#extraordinary mythos

[pyrasterran]

I draw a lot of Thunder Woman material for the owner of TW, here’s one piece

[stardusteyes]

This is such a weird joke that’s so hyper-specific to me

Also should I read some of Dunsany’s stuff?

I believe the original image is from Reddit

[anarcho-occultism]

Miskatonic University

Miskatonic University is a private university based in Arkham, Massachusetts. Miskatonic University was established in 1690 by Ward Phillips. The University originally was heavily modeled on neighboring schools like Harvard, but would begin to move in a different direction early on when, in 1693, Philips gained custody of a number of rare occult books from the collection of the Sanderson sisters in the aftermath of the Salem witch trials. Thus, from an early era, Miskatonic University was heavily colored by an interest in paranormal and occult phenomena. This would in early history largely remain underground–especially in the late 1600’s still dominated by a Puritan ethos. However, the university would gain a reputation for addressing unusual incidents. It was Miskatonic University scholars who were tasked with figuring out what caused the events around Rip Van Winkle’s anomalously long sleep, investigating rumors of a so-called ‘headless horseman’ in the backwoods of New York and carrying out research into reversing the effects of ‘the Alteration’ rendering the ocean treacherous to navigate. Much of this research was carried out in secret by professors ostensibly dedicated to other subjects. In the mid-19th century, the growth of Spiritualism and interest in the occult led to the founding of the Hermetic Order of the Blue Rose at the school, which quickly became a much larger esoteric order. A large archive of occult tomes and supernatural artifacts were accumulated at the school and in 1871, the American Secure Containment Initiative was founded by Artemus Gordon, Brisco County, Sr., and Jonah Hex, who set up the ASCI’s headquarters underneath the campus library.

These elements largely remained underground into the early 20th century, though plenty of cracks were present. Miskatonic University professors helped analyze the origins of the so-called ‘boomfood’ that triggered a wave of gigantism in the 1900’s, recognizing that radioactive particles played a key role. Research into weapons development sponsored by the U.S. government made it a major target during the War in the Air, with German air raids heavily damaging the campus. It has been suggested that Dr. Herbert West’s later experiments occurred because of trauma experienced when West survived a bombing raid that killed an entire class of students in the room with him. A number of Miskatonic University faculty became involved in incidents involving the supernatural or paranormal-Henry Armitage, Randolph Carter, and Seneca Lapham among others-but overall most students were more focused on traditional prestige in this era. While the occasional figure in the vein of William Fitzgerald or Trevor Bruttenholm was attracted to attend by the university’s occult underground, this was the exception rather than the rule well into the 20th century.

However, the mid-20th century saw the paranormal and occult elements of Miskatonic University creep into the open. As part of the Cold War, the US government had developed a keen interest in supernatural phenomenon and developed many agencies–Delta Green, the Unusual Incidents Unit, the Federal Bureau of Control and the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense–aimed at researching the supernatural, combating threats it posed and even perhaps weaponizing it. Miskatonic University’s familiarity with these anomalies was seen as a positive by the government. Furthermore, the prestige associated with paranormal and anomalous research was expanding. Columbia University Professor John Montague had helped make parapsychology a much more respectable field. These factors combined to allow for Miskatonic University to become the first university in the world to open up a Department of Paranormal Studies, containing such majors as Parapsychology, Occult Studies and Esoteric Archaeology. The existence of these departments would require unconventional hiring choices and so the likes of paranormal investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren, MACUSA member Gomez Addams, self-proclaimed ‘psychic doctor’ Miles Pennoyer and former news anchor Carl Kolchak would end up among the faculty of the school by 1980. Members of the Department would play a key role in providing information to the White Committee, which sought to determine the implications of the Black Prom incident in Chamberlain, Maine (though much of the opinions of Miskatonic faculty were discarded by the committee).

The establishment of the Department helped the school draw an unorthodox array of students in the years that followed. Alongside the old-money crowd of future lawyers and businessmen came the likes of Lydia Deetz, Jack and Maddie Fenton, Tommy Jarvis, Nathan Dawkins and Nancy Thompson-all figures drawn to the school by its expertise regarding supernatural and paranormal phenomenon. However, this also drew less savory individuals to the school. The likes of Nikolai Wolf (who would resort to human sacrifice to gain fame for his band Low Shoulder), Cole Turner (a half-demon lawyer who briefly became the Source of All Evil) Edgar Zambus (the creator of a strain of zombism that combines supernatural and viral methods of reanimation that he deliberately infected himself with), Roman Armitage (inventor of the infamous Coagula procedure which hijacked the bodies of numerous African-Americans) and Amy Hughe (a serial killer and worshiper of the demon Malphas) all attended or were planning to attend the school only to make use of its occult secrets for not-so-noble ends. The near-miss awakening of Cthulhu in 1983 during World War III only further caused the school to develop a sinister reputation. Senator Bob Roberts launched a quixotic bid to bar students attending the school from receiving federal financial aid in the 1990’s over these ties to black magic, though his proposal never made it in front of the President before Roberts resigned due to being implicated in the Mattiece scandal of 1993.

The more sinister reputation enjoyed by the school was particularly ironic knowing the role of faculty, alumni and current students in preventing a number of prophesied calamities surrounding Y2K. Miskatonic University Professor Iain Gladstone was the first to take notice of multiple prophecies related to the Apocalypse being fulfilled in the lead-up to the turn of the millennium. Working with his colleagues Rayna Kazuki, Leroy Brown and Dirk Pitt, Gladstone worked to recruit a team that could identify potential Antichrists and, if possible, eliminate them. Most of the team were current students at the school-Sarah Bailey, Steve Urkel, Charlie McGee, Casey Connor and Kate Libby were selected based on a combination of desired research capabilities and known or implied paranormal prowess. Beyond the current students, the quartet of professors brought in a few university alumni-the previously mentioned Lydia Deetz, ex-football star Scott Howard and on-and-off X-Men team member Katherine ‘Kitty’ Pryde. Aside from Deetz, the alumni were brought in as additional muscle. Through diligent investigation, this team was able to identify Angel Caine-the son of businessman Robert Caine-as a potential Antichrist working through his father’s business empire to bring about the End Times. Caine had additionally formed an alliance with Adrian Woodhouse, another potential Antichrist who sought to co-opt remnants of older Great Old One cults for his ends. The team brought these two to the attention of the BPRD and, alongside a military forced headed by one Colonel John McNamara, were able to prevent Armageddon.

The modern Miskatonic University has enjoyed an enormous boost to prestige following the Awakening of Magic and the widespread embrace of occult and supernatural research. The school was able to greatly expand operations as a result, pursuing ideas that were fringe even amidst the ‘new normal’ of anomalies. After the Amphibian invasion of 2020, the school became a locus of research into extradimensional phenomenon, discovering the realms of Mewni, World A, Oz, and Throne among many others. Researchers from the school helped create the EVA units used to fight the so-called ‘angel’ incursions of the 2010’s and chronicling the spread of ‘quirks’ across 90% of the human population post-Awakening of Magic. Miskatonic University has also begun tracking temporal anomalies after the Warren & Warren incident of 2021, partnering with Britain’s Anomaly Research Center in the process (the ARC has indicated interest in a ‘temporal storm’ appearing to connect 2023, 1890, 1941 and 2053 in some way). Beyond this renown, however, the highs and lows of a normal prestigious school remain. Students briefly seized control of Armitage Hall in protest of the school accepting a $30 million grant from Fortunato Pharmaceuticals, right-wing pundit Lindsey Bluth-Funke has condemned the school for pushing ‘wokeness’ and allegations that rich alumni bribe there way into the school continue to dog its reputation alongside its more fantastical dimension.

References

Cthulhu Mythos, The Lurker at the Threshold, Hocus Pocus, Rip Van Winkle, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, The Order, SCP Foundation, The Wild Wild West, The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr., Jonah Hex, The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth, The War in the Air, Herbert West: Re-Animator, The Lurker at the Threshold, The Diviners (Bray novel), Delta Green, Control, Hellboy, The Haunting of Hill House, The Conjuring, The Addams Family, Miles Pennoyer, Kolchak the Night Stalker, Carrie, Beetlejuice, Danny Phantom, Friday the 13th, Beyond: Two Souls, Nightmare on Elm Street, Jennifer’s Body, Charmed, Plants vs. Zombies, Get Out, Dead of Summer, A Colder War, Bob Roberts, The Pelican Brief, The Secret World, Explorer Woman Ray, Encyclopedia Brown, Dirk Pitt, The Craft, Family Matters, Firestarter, The Faculty, Hackers, Teen Wolf, X-Men, Holocaust 2000, Rosemary’s Baby, Hatchetfield Universe, Shadowrun, Amphibia, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, Final Fantasy, The Land of Oz, Kill Six Billion Demons, Neon Genesis Evangelion, My Hero Academia, Old (film), Primeval, Bodies (Netflix series), The Fall of the House of Usher (2023), Arrested Development, Scooby Doo, Ghostbusters

[goodgirlofglory]

A successful trial run/ One-shot

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x reader

Word count: 9,2k

Warnings: Explicit sexual content, explicit language, smut, making out, nipple-play, dry-humping, coming in pants hehe, me making up a lot of unconvincing sciency talk about tech and engineering and whatnot.

Summary: As a newly recruited scientist in the royal technical institute of Wakanda, your first task involves a certain Winter Soldier fresh out of cryostasis and in need of a new arm. Intrigued by his mysterious figure since forever, you’re brimming with fascination over the subject. Little did you anticipate capturing his eye in return. 

Note: This takes place somewhere between Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Avengers Infinity War. Kinda wanted to write something from the time Bucky spent in Wakanda. I enjoyed writing this one, hope you enjoy reading it😘 Likes, replies and reblogs are amazing. Luv you guys, you are the best, i am always so grateful and excited to receive all your feedback💕💕🦋

The first time the Winter Soldier entered the lab, he was flanked by the entire Dora Milaje and led by the king himself. Apart from the usual ceremony of greeting the king and his guest of honor, no one seemed jittered nor particularly preoccupied with the new project - or its primary subject. The engineers, scientists and technicians of the royal technical institute and Wakandan Design group were used to making much more extravagant and complicated designs than a prosthetic arm. 

It was a regular Tuesday for everyone - except you, that was. Extraordinarily gifted from a young age, you had quickly advanced and surpassed your peers and even superiors in your studies at the university of the capitol. Subsequently, you were the youngest person in the lab - apart from princess Shuri herself. 

And you were almost jumping out of your skin with excitement at having the Winter Soldier as your very first test subject. Or rather, you were on the team that was to build his next vibranium arm. You’d read all about him and watched all the news over the years, but you had started working in the lab after he’d been brought to Wakanda and put in cryostasis, so you’d never actually seen him in the flesh. Now he was out of cryo for rehabilitation and with that came the need for a new arm. Shuri had picked the team herself, and to your utter surprise, chosen you as a part of it. 

Your task was fairly simple: organize and execute the fitting of the prosthetic prototypes with the subject himself, take notes and report to the team whatever adjustments the soldier would prefer. The others would do most of the engineering, creative modeling and building - the more prestigious work. You didn’t really care that your tasks were relatively simple and low level though - it was an amazing learning experience for a newbie like you. Plus, it meant you were the primary contact person for the soldier himself, which had you flushing hot for both professional and decidedly less professional reasons. 

The soldier was an enigma; lethal chaos and extreme discipline spliced inside the body of what was once a regular American. His mythos was both intriguingly detailed and all at once a mystery - a sort of dangerous puzzle you couldn’t help but be drawn to like a moth to a flame. Everything he had lived and experienced and represented was so very very far from your own safe and mundane world. It wasn’t that growing up in Wakanda had been boring per se, but everything was just so… perfect, and despite yourself, you were drawn to the Winter Soldier and the extraordinary case of his unusual life. And from the moment you’d laid eyes on him, you knew you were out of your depth. 

He was beautiful - in a rugged, unpolished sort of way; raw and hauntingly real, he only seemed to move when it served the explicit purpose of his visit. Otherwise, he stood still as a statue. He had an air of mystery to him, but despite his huge, menacing and burly form, he wasn’t scary. His eyes were soft, the babiest of blue, his stubble revealed tiny streaks of silver, and his hair, though washed and groomed, had a consistently shaggy look to it that made him seem…human. Just another regular white guy to everyone else in the lab - the most intriguing person in Wakanda to you. 

Along with the king, the soldier had silently shaken the hand of everyone on the team, looking them in the eyes with a polite, though quite stoic expression that betrayed nothing of what was happening on the inside. You’d stared at him as he'd made his way down the line, scrutinized every inch of his face, trying to gauge the tiniest twitch of muscle, any indication or hint of emotion - to your utter astonishment, you could see nothing. Then he'd reached where you stood at the end of the line of team members, and your heart'd kicked into a sprint at the way he suddenly loomed before you in all his muscled, mystical and deadly glory. Holy shit, he was huge, surely a foot taller than you, with the most obscenely broad shoulders and thighs that bulged in a way that had your mouth going dry.

Get yourself together! Stop ogling the subject!, you had admonished yourself harshly.

By the time you got back in contact with your body and reached a hand out to him, your palms were sweaty and your face hot. And then, as he engulfed your hand in his pale, calloused one, hot like a multilayered sonic solar panel during july, you thought you saw a muscle near his eye twitch, catching your gaze the same way his eyes did a moment later when they glinted with something suspiciously alike curiosity, a flashing moment of undivided interest that had you flushing even hotter. 

Oh yeah, you were in big, big trouble. 

§

Three months later you no longer broke out in panicked sweating whenever Barnes came in for a fitting (most of the time). You’d had a total of four meetings so far, all of which had been professional, short and silent. Barnes hadn’t spoken more than a few words to you in all your time together in the lab, and none of them of much importance.

("Here?" he'd asked that first fitting when you’d asked him to take a seat on the surgical bench. 

"No" he'd said when you asked if the new fastenings at his shoulder were uncomfortable.

"Yes", he'd said when you’d asked if the first prototype arm was lighter than what he was used to.

Other than that, the winter soldier mostly communicated in grunts, nods and shakes of his head.)

The hiss of the sliding door alerted you to his arrival as you were readying the newest prototype for the fitting, and just like always, the door was the only sound even hinting at his presence. He was impossibly silent for a guy his size. 

“Sit down, please, I’ll be ready in a moment,” you threw over your shoulder, keeping your eyes on the clasps you would try on the shoulder today. 

When he didn’t answer and you could hear no sound of the shifting padding on the surgical bench, you threw a look over your shoulder and froze. 

Barnes stood by the bench, his one flesh arm raised high, fingers adjusting something on the…bun on the back of his head. His…bun of…gorgeous, thick locks of shaggy brown hair. You gulped, a tingling sensation of adrenaline starting to well up in your chest. He hadn’t worn his hair like that before, at least not around you, and man were you a sucker for a nice hair do on a man. Combined with this man it seemed to be suddenly and quite effectively lethal. His locks were collected and pulled away from his face, revealing high, chiseled cheekbones and a jawline that could cut diamonds and -

A screw fell out of your hand as your mind worked overtime to process the image before you, and then, so quickly you didn’t even see him move, the soldier was there, crouching at your feet, catching the screw before it could clink onto the floor. 

It felt like an eternity went by as you stared at his bent form slowly straighten up up up to his full height, the screw looking more like a grain of sand in his big, calloused and rough hand, his body so close you swore you could feel the warmth radiating off him. The lulling scent of fresh earth and spices filled your nose, taking you to luscious lands far away. 

You heard the hitch in your tiny, involuntary intake of air like a siren in a dead silent night, and your face blazed to a million fucking degrees, your heart galloping in your chest. Swallowing thickly, you looked up into his pale eyes - eyes that betrayed nothing in an equally neutral face. 

Fuckfuckfuck, he’s so close. Fuck, his eyes are so blue, shit, he smells good, is that freckles on his cheek bones - 

He held the screw out expectantly, and you mentally shook yourself for being so fucking slow. Stop ogling him! Take the screw! With fingers you were relieved to see didn’t tremble, you reached out and plucked it from his light grasp, furiously not hyperfocusing on where your skin grazed his. 

“Um,” you started, and painfully cleared your throat before trying again, cheeks burning, “t-thanks. Please, sit.”

He stayed unmoving for half a second longer than was strictly necessary, and then he turned and moved to sit on the surgical bench. 

Turning back to your table of tools, you took a few calming breaths, breathing as softly as you could in case the soldier could hear you (which he probably could quite well considering what you’d read about his enhanced body and senses.)

You turned back to find him watching you from a seated position on the bench, eyes following your movement as you walked up towards him, pulling your table behind you. You plastered on your best carefree smile and picked up the prototype vibranium arm, sleek black with silver accents, and like you always did, held it up so he could inspect it if he chose to. Like always, he didn’t seem remotely interested in the design. Only, he didn’t stare ahead out into the room like he usually did during these parts of the fittings. Instead his eyes remained on you, his form so fucking unmoving he could be a statue. You swallowed thickly, absurdly nervous. His scent still lingered in your mind. 

He’d removed his shirt, revealing the new shoulder prosthesis in the same black as the arm, fitted to mold over his scarred tissue and make a clean transition from steel to skin. Your eyes caught on the tiny sliver of golden, muscled skin peeking out from where his white t-shirt had been cut above the shoulder, and you quickly averted your gaze even as your mind started conjuring images of wide expanses of soft, golden skin under the tips of your fingers as you explored under rays of soft, morning sunlight. 

Why did he have to look so god damned good, with his stupid hair up in a stupid bun and stupid t-shirt that dared show even a square centimeter of his stupid skin, you thought perturbed as you started fitting the arm to the shoulder, hands working on autopilot while your mind frayed at the edges. 

All through the fitting, you felt his eyes linger on you, not staring per se, just…observing. Three times you peeked up from your work to catch his eyes on yours, and three times you hastily averted your gaze back, your cheeks heating anew, your heart picking up speed. He’d never done that before. He’d always just stared at the floor or the wall during his fittings, eyes vacant, seemingly far far away. He’d never been fully present, never watched you, very rarely met your eyes. It was what had kept your own visceral reactions to such a minimum you could easily manage them. But now, under his weighty gaze, your body started tingling all over, sweat gathering on your brow, your breathing going just slightly too fast. You didn’t know if it was excitement or some instinctive fight or flight-reflex kicking into gear. Why was he looking at you like that?

“There,” you said just a little too hastily when at last the final screw was in place. You retreated to the other side of the room under the guise of organizing your tools back into their rightful place on the wall. “Please test it out, feel how it fits, tell me how it feels,” you said with your back to him, reciting the instructions you always gave him during this part of the fitting. Usually, you observed him closely as he walked around the room, lifting the arm, flexing the fingers and grabbing at random objects to test grip and reactivity. Now it was all you could do to not flee the room all together due to how embarrassingly flustered you were. The fittings in themselves weren’t really necessary from an engineering perspective - the royal technical institute all but guaranteed the highest mark of quality and a near zero percent chance of faults. The fittings were more beneficial from a psychological point of view - to give the subject a smooth transitional introduction to their new limb. 

You heard him shuffling about for some time while you randomly moved tools and screws around your table while trying to collect and promptly ban all the inappropriate thoughts running wild in your head. It was so unprofessional to be affected like this! Sure, he was handsome (wildly so) but you couldn’t call yourself a proper scientist if you acted like this! It was disgraceful! Even as you scolded yourself for being this way around the poor, innocent hunk - SUBJECT - your mind flooded with the thoughts you tried so hard to keep at bay. What did his hair feel like sliding through your fingers? Did he always gaze so intently? What would those eyes look like in dark rooms surrounded by soft sheets? What would that new metal hand look like wrapped around your - 

The sound of a throat clearing had you yelping - for fuck’s sake, girl - and whipping around to find him right behind you, looking down at you with that expression that betrayed nothing. 

You stared up at him for a moment, heart thumping in your chest, stunned to silence by his clear initiation of contact, and then abruptly found your sense. 

“Does it feel right? Is anything uncomfortable or -”

Your words died out as he extended the vibranium hand between you. He let it hover there, hand straight, expectant. You stared for a moment, and then praised yourself for daring to reach your own hand out to clasp his, a bit unused to the flip to using your left hand to shake his, hoping to God this was what he was getting at and that you didn’t just make a fool of yourself. 

Your interpretation was correct, and the smooth, slightly cold metal closed around you, dwarfing your hand. The soldier squeezed your fingers and then shook your hand a bit stiffly a couple of times before stilling. You gulped, acutely aware of your heartbeat running a gallop in your chest, the silence around you so severe you could hear your own breathing like a wind tunnel. The feel of the vibranium, so alive in this form and shape, squeezing your fingers in a firm, unyielding grip had new, strange sensations slowly trickling south, and you fought the instinct to clench your thighs as unwelcome heat pooled in your lower stomach. Mortified by your own, inappropriate and decidedly unprofessional reaction, you hoped to all the dead kings and Bast herself that the soldier didn’t notice. Disturbingly, there came no sound from the soldier, not even from his breathing. 

After a moment of nothing happening, the both of you just standing there, clasping hands, you dared a peek up at his face. He was watching you again, but instead of pale, dead eyes, the blue of his irises simmered with something…something hot and wicked and - 

You abruptly pulled your hand out of his grasp, and gave him a far too fake gleeful smile. “Good grip,” you jipped, voice coming out far too strained and shrill to be casual. Barnes looked at you with those captivating eyes for a moment longer before looking down at his vibranium hand, flexing the fingers a little. 

“It’s perfect,” he said. 

It took you a moment to register the words, and then elation swept through you. You smiled and clapped your hands together and spun to go note his comment down.  “How wonderful, I’m so glad,” you said, not able to keep the excitement out of your voice.  A happy subject meant you’d fulfilled your task! The project could move onto its final stages of rendering and documentation. Happy progress!  You scribbled down some fast notes on the screws and fastenings, how he’d tested grip by shaking your hands and his own feedback, putting his exact words down as a quote. 

“The team will be so happy to learn you’re satisfied, they talked so much about the latest updates on the interface between sensory input and mechanical automobility - they wouldn’t shut up about it for days, I swear to Bast,” you said, the words falling out of your mouth in your excitement, and then you turned back towards him and again fell silent. 

He was staring at you, and for the first time, you could actually detect emotions on his face. He looked…dumbfounded, or something akin to that, watching you with avid eyes, mouth slightly open and brows for once out of their trademark downturned frown. You were stunned yourself for a moment seeing him so out of character, and then you promptly lowered your gaze. 

Oh great, first you’re fumbling and awkward and then you start rambling like a lunatic. What is wrong with you?, you asked yourself silently.  You cleared your throat and motioned for him to sit back on the bench. He obliged, and you found yourself slightly disappointed to see him schooling away his emotion behind the stoic mask. 

“So, I’ll have to take the arm off so it can be finalized, and then you’ll just have to have it fastened a final time, and then you’ll have your arm, Mr. Barnes,” you said as you got to work unscrewing and removing the prosthetic limb. He nodded, eyes glued to you like before. He didn’t seem happy, or if he was, he didn’t show it. You hoped he’d feel elated like you did, but considered how the whole metal arm thing might still be a little complicated for him. You wondered if he was going to a therapist, or a support group or anything. You didn’t dare ask, though. “I imagine the finalizing process won’t take much more than two weeks. I’ll send you a suggestion for the next appointment once it’s clear, and you can confirm using your compad like before. Sound good?” you asked, thankful you could keep a clear head through this part at least. 

“Yes,” he said, still watching your eyes as you removed the arm and returned it to the table. You nodded to him, and managed to stay upright until the door hissed shut behind him as he left. Then you curled into a mortified little ball and hid your flaming face in your hands. 

§

Fucking. Great. 

Your heart had been hammering harder for every mile that passed as your cruiser made its way into the heart of the Wakandan landscape. The prosthetic arm had been finalized within a couple of days and your superiors thought the best course of action was sending you out to fasten it instead of demanding Barnes make his way into the capitol on such short notice. Which meant you were on your way to his home, to be completely alone with him…in his home.   

Part of you was insatiably curious to see how he lived, to peer into such a private, revealing place. Everyone knew seeing how a person lived was like seeing a reflection of their soul. Your apartment for instance, was a hot fucking mess, but one you could navigate perfectly. You hadn’t allowed yourself to picture Barnes’s home, though, or make any assumptions. How he lived was of no scientific interest, and therefore no interest to you! Or so you told yourself, at least…

It’s fine. Everything is fine, you chanted in your head as the cruiser arrived at its destination, the small hut Barnes had been gifted as his indefinite residence. It was a beautiful place to keep a residence, right by the river, the surrounding trees providing plenty of shade from the hot sun and a gorgeous view over the plains. It only made you more curious about Barnes, and subsequently, more furious with yourself. 

Everything is fine. 

As you shut the motor down and climbed out of the vehicle, his large, burly figure emerged from the hut, and a spike of energy went off inside you as you locked eyes with Barnes. He was as stoic as ever, but he walked up to meet you right away and surprised you when he reached to grab the case with the arm in it to carry it for you. 

“Hi,” you said, and quickly added, “um, thanks for being available at such a short notice.” 

You’d felt kinda foolish for giving such a roomy deadline prognosis at his last fitting only for it to take a few days, and were sweating with the hope it hadn’t inconvenienced him in any way. There was a whole delicate, psychological process involved in getting a new limb - a process one shouldn’t meddle too much in - especially when there was significant trauma involved in losing the original limb. Fuck, you were so nervous.

He looked a bit puzzled for a moment, brows drawn down in consideration. 

“No. Thank you for coming all this way,” he said a bit haltingly, and to your astonishment, he sounded almost as unsure of himself as you felt. Uncomfortable warmth spread in your chest. That must have been the longest sentence he’d ever spoken to you. His voice was low and gruff, a smooth rumble that seemed to vibrate through the ground, across to you and straight into your chest. Fuuck, how were you supposed to survive that voice, and with him being uncharacteristically timid and polite?

Suddenly you felt like laughing. Here you were, both of you so awkward and unsure, and what for? This was a joyous occasion, for Bast's sake, and you were being silly! Forcing your nerves down, you leveled him with a smile. 

“Not at all. Let’s get that arm on, shall we?” you said, letting your actual excitement for the happening fill you instead. You were after all, genuinely excited to finally give Barnes his new prosthetic limb, and see him back to full mobility. 

He stared at you for a moment, his eyes fluttering around your face, and then abruptly stepped aside and gestured for you to proceed him into the hut. You obliged, holding your spirits high as you dared venture past the curtain and inside the hut. 

Barnes’s home was sparsely furnished but…surprisingly cozy. Brightly coloured pillows, blankets and tapestries lay everywhere, a window to the right letting in the bright, midday sun, casting a glowing light on everything. You recognised the patterns and color scheme from your own parents and grandparents houses, it was a traditional home in all senses of the words. You’d think Barnes would stick out like a sore thumb here, but really, he seemed to fit in well. There was a low table to the left with stacks of books and a mug on it, surrounded by more pillows and blankets. Your eyes caught on and swiftly ignored the cot at the back of the hut, made perfectly with a mountain of pillows. 

That’s where he sleeps. That’s where he rests. That’s where he’s most vulnerable. That’s where you would lay if he - NO!

Barnes squeezed around you where you stood just inside the entrance studying the space, and you quite viscerally realized how small the hut was for the two of you, how small it was for him alone really. This was gonna be way more tight and intimate than the lab, you thought with a mix of excitement and trepidation.

Barnes put the case down by the low table and proceeded to start clearing the table of books and pens and the mug. He looked down into the mug and then over at you. 

“Coffee?” he asked, and taken aback by the unexpected question, you shook your head quickly before immediately regretting it. It would’ve been more polite to accept, and you did feel a bit strung out by your morning so far. 

Barnes nodded in response, and then seemed at a loss, turning the mug in his hand. Was he…fidgeting? 

“Where do you -?” he started, and you cut him off. 

“Right there is fine. We can sit on the floor, no problem,” you said reassuringly, giving him another smile, suddenly filled with sweetness for this big hulk of a man and his nervous fidgeting. He nodded and proceeded to plump down where you assumed he normally sat. You quelled a smile at how normalcy seemed to bleed through even this exceedingly awkward situation, and was kind of enamored by the way Barnes seemed to relax once he was seated in his usual spot. It gave you the impression that this space was a comfort to him, which you were glad to see. 

You neared and sat down on your knees at his side, opening the case and swiftly taking out everything you needed as he took off his shirt to reveal the same t-shirt he used to wear underneath, sleeveless on the left side. Without further ado, you started the process of permanently fastening the arm. You slipped into a calm concentration as you worked, the familiarity and comfort of your skills calming you, a comfortable silence descending upon you both, only interrupted by the sounds of your electric screwdriver. The whole thing took no longer than ten minutes, and then you sat back and looked upon Barnes in silence as he took in his new arm, knowing it was finally, and wholly, his. 

He stared down at it for a long while, and then the hut was filled with sounds of gentle, almost silent whirring as he started flexing mechanical muscles, then fingers, then the whole arm, lifting it to examine and compare to his other arm, running them both through his loose hair and picking up different items on his table and tossing them lightly from hand to hand. He seemed completely engrossed, and for long minutes it seemed almost like he’d forgotten you were even there as he explored his new arm. 

It was awe-inspiring to see, to be allowed to observe such a vulnerable moment, to witness him seemingly letting himself really connect to this new possibility of having two arms and two hands again, in a way he hadn’t even seemed to entertain while in the fittings. It touched something deep inside you, witnessing with honor what you hoped might be a moment of healing, and tears pricked the back of your eyes. It felt so incredibly moving to be part of a team that could give something like this to a person who’d been through so much hardship, and the feeling filled you, making you feel all warm. This was why you’d gotten into this field, this was why you wanted to be a scientist. To be able to help people recover precious things lost. 

Your heart swelled with emotion, and then Barnes looked at you, his own astonished joy blasted clear across his face, completely unencumbered, letting you see it without any pretense or facades. Your breath caught in your throat at the sheer volume of his joy, and how intimate him sharing it so openly with you was. You were stunned. 

And then you kissed him. 

One moment you were looking at his broad smile full of slightly crooked, white teeth, and then you’d leaned across your own knees and half across his and unceremoniously pressed your lips to his. It was closed-mouthed and a bit off-center, your bottom lip caught awkwardly on his top one. But sparks crackled through your body all the same as you felt how soft his lips were, how warm his skin was, the slightly surprised gust of warm, gentle air from his nostrils. 

And then your senses kicked in, mortification hot on their heels, and you broke the kiss abruptly, all but ready to flee the hut. You didn’t get the chance to move away though, before cool metal fingers slid up the sensitive skin of your throat and back to cup your neck, gently, but firmly pulling you right back into the kiss.

A fire caught in your loins, sizzling hot sparks shooting up your body and you drew in a shaky breath through your nose only for the air to be caught in your throat, making a small, needy, desperately embarrassing sound. The metal fingers on your neck tightened at the sound. 

You felt completely blown off your center. Nothing had felt this good before, nothing in your whole, perfect life full of joys and pleasures and fulfillment had felt so sensationally good as James Buchanan Barnes's lips on yours while his brand new prosthetic hand cradled your neck.

The surge of desire that welled from that feeling propelled you to buck forward and crawl into his laps, straddling him with even more clumsy frenzy as you kissed him again. He answered in kind, his flesh hand landing tentatively on your hip before moving up your back to pull you tighter against him once he seemingly caught on to the fact that you were there in his lap of your own fruition. 

You kissed again and again, hungry, exploring, closed-mouthed but growing more desperate, more daring. You opened your mouth to catch your breath and was met by the shy swipe of his tongue just inside your mouth, and your whole body shuddered at the sensation before you wrapped your arms around his neck and swiped your own tongue to meet his. 

A growl came out of nowhere and exploded in Barnes’s chest as you tongue-kissed him with everything you had, and then the world was spinning, and your back hit the brightly earth-coloured rug. Barnes followed you closely, and laid down on top of you, pinning you down with his huge, burly body, claiming your mouth in an honest-to-Bast breath-taking kiss. 

It was explosively good, this gorgeous, muscled beast of a man pinning you to the ground, broad shoulders shielding you from everything above, leaning on his elbows while his hands cradled your face, holding you perfectly still as his mouth descended upon yours again and again, growing hungrier with every kiss. Your mind whirled with images of his metal arm wrapping around your throat, pinning you down, tearing your clothes to shreds and holding you put exactly where he wanted while the soldier ravished you, and it became even harder to pull air into your flaming lungs. You heard yourself whimpering into the kisses, your own desperation growing like a galloping crescendo inside you. You were suddenly, unexpectedly, and totally irrationally ready for him to tear your clothes off and take you right there on the floor of his hut, heat flaming in your lower stomach, a molten ache starting to let itself be known between your legs, everything else in the world be damned and forgotten if you could just feel him ins - 

A small beeping sound cut through the fog of desire overtaking you, and it took you a moment for your melting brain to recognise it as your pager. You wrenched out of the kiss and put your hands on Barnes’s broad, warm chest, feeling his strong heartbeat jackhammer beneath the layers of clothes and flesh. His lips followed you for a split second, his eyes opening to slits in order to find you again. Then, as he realized you’d intentionally ended the kiss, he immediately let you push him half-way off you to fish the pager out of your pocket. It was your boss, they needed you back by lunch. 

Fuck

Fuck, what the fuck were you doing? It dawned on you the incredibly inappropriate situation you were in, had put yourself and Barnes in. This was reckless and rash and completely not who you were or had ever been. With anyone! No, no, no, this was bad, you were so fucking stupid. You couldn’t bring yourself to meet his eyes as you pushed him gently all the way off you to sit back on his haunches and swiftly extracted yourself from under him and got to your feet. 

You were mortified, absolutely mortified, shame and embarrassment and guilt washing over you in tidal waves, slamming into your chest. 

“I’m so sorry, that was so…um…I have to go, but er, enjoy your hand - ARM and hand,” you sputtered out as you began fleeing the hut all together. Then you remembered what you were supposed to say upon leaving, and turned while halfway out the door, “If you have any trouble or complications, don’t hesitate to contact the institute. On behalf of the technical institute and design group, we hope you will be pleased with the product. Um, bye!”

Barnes remained in the same seated position on the floor while you made your stumbling exit, and you missed the look of longing in his eyes as you left. 

§

A week passed while you marinated in your own embarrassment and guilt, trying and failing to get the whole incident in the hut out of your mind. Partly because it was the most unprofessional and out-of-control thing you’d ever done, and partly because you just couldn’t get the memory of Barnes’s lips out of your head. The warmth emanating from him like a furnace, the way his hands gripped you gently, but possessively, the thrill that had gone through you when he flipped you and pinned you to the floor like you were nothing more than a rag doll. Had he been as turned on as you? Had he enjoyed himself? Surely he’d enjoyed it a little bit with the way he’d reciprocated, but had he really wanted it?

You shook yourself out of your daydream for probably the dozenth time that day, not a single word written on the personal essay you were to turn in with your other documentation in a couple of days. Fuuuck, this was so bad, you had to be able to focus and put this from your mind! If you were lucky and if everything went as it should with the prosthetic, Barnes would have no reason to contact the institute and seek you out ever again, and you would never have to see him again after your blunder. 

The project would be over soon, you would move on to new ones and the one tether you had to Barnes would be severed. It was best for everyone if you just forgot the whole thing. 

Except, in your panicked flight from his home, you’d completely forgotten the case that had contained the prosthetic arm, along with some screws and your most beloved screwdriver. You hadn’t even noticed it was left behind until you were halfway back to the lab, and had been completely at a loss on what to do. You couldn’t go back after the way you’d left, but you couldn’t just leave it either. The equipment wasn’t of that much value and the lab had plenty more, so that wasn’t the greatest issue. But you loved that screwdriver, and felt it as an obligation to retrieve it. Plus, it wasn’t fair to just leave it there, in Barnes’s home, what use did he have of it? Still, you couldn’t bear the thought of going back after the way you’d left….

Your head thumped down onto the workbench at the back of your lab. You were spiraling down the rabbit hole of warring thoughts for the upteenth time that day and was about to hurl something at the wall when the clearing of a throat came out of nowhere. 

Whipping your head up, you practically leapt from your chair when you saw Barnes standing  in the middle of your lab, clad in light pants and a loose-fitting half-sleeved shirt, completely unexpected, looking exceedingly unsure of himself (...and obscenely gorgeous)

Your immediate thought went to his arm, but as far as you could see, it was still intact and working perfectly from the way he clenched and unclenched the vibranium hand at his side. Then your eyes slipped to his other hand, and saw the case he held in it. 

“I, um, hello, I thought you might like this back,” he said, looking down and holding out the hand with the case. You immediately walked up to him and took it. 

“Thank you! So much, you didn’t have to come all this way just for that,” you rushed to say, feeling sheepish and grateful at the same time. 

“Oh no, I, uh…I…I have some errands in the… uh, the city and whatnot,” he said, and you almost smiled a little at the way he suddenly fumbled for words. Was this even the same guy that had pinned you to the floor and ravished your mouth a week ago? The same guy that had walked into the lab that first day, all menacing silence and calculated movement.

“Oh, okay, well, this was really nice of you, thank you again. Um, what did you say to the guards to get in here?” you asked, suddenly remembering the levels of clearing he had to go through to get here. Did he tell the truth? Would your superiors know you forgot the case? That you’d made a fool of yourself and made the whole institute look chaotic and unprofessional?

“I told them I had some more questions about the arm, and that I wanted to speak with you since you’re so knowledgeable and good at your job,” Barnes said, waving his metal hand in the air a little as if to show you it was indeed made of vibranium. 

He’d protected you? Kept your secret? A warm sense of giddyness spread through you, and you bit your lip to keep from smiling to broadly. 

“God, you didn’t have to tell them all that,” you said, feeling warmth bloom on your cheeks from his compliments. 

“I meant it, though,” he said seriously, and then he took a step towards you, “And I wanted to, needed to apologize…for what happened at my house…last week.”

Your heart surged in your chest and you couldn’t bear to meet his eyes. Apologize? What could he have to apologize for? You were the one who’d acted out of line. Did he regret what’d happened? What if you’d overstepped his boundaries and added more to his trauma?

“No, no, please, I’m the one who should apologize here. It was completely unprofessional to do that when I was working on a project with you, and so inappropriate to force myself upon you like that, all in this emotional moment and without knowing if you’d enjoy it or -”

“I enjoyed it,” he interrupted, voice clear and strong.

You looked up to find him another step closer. So big, and strong, and handsome, your insatiable desire whispered to you as he gazed down into your eyes, only inches between you. You wanted to kiss him again suddenly, your lips tingled with it. 

“You did?” you asked, only half paying attention as you lost yourself in his heavenly baby blue eyes, framed by thick lashes paled by the sun. Your eyes flicked down to his full lips, and when they went back to his eyes, they glinted with a spark of that same ferociousness that’d awakened in him on that floor in his hut. A glint that had your lower stomach going all molten. 

He nodded, breathing a little laugh that surprised you. Your heart started soaring in your chest despite your best efforts to keep from getting ahead of yourself. 

“Yeah,” he breathed, swallowing and licking his lips, “a lot. I, uh, I was really sorry to see you leave so abruptly too  - before I could speak with you,” he said. 

Arousal welled up in your body, and you felt a little dizzy all of a sudden. He’d enjoyed it…

“Me too,” you whispered, not trusting your voice not to crack. 

He took a final, tiny step closer, too close for any kind of professionalism or even decency, really, so close you could almost sense the atoms sparking to life in the tiny space between your bodies. Just like that, you were back in his hut, the moment swelling to level with the heavy, sizzling churn of when he'd flipped you to the carpet and caged you in underneath him. He had such a presence, his body thrumming with life and power and fuck, you wanted it on top of you. Again. 

“I’m relieved to hear that. And,” he said, slowly reaching his flesh hand to tentatively cup your neck, hot and possessive in one, tender gesture, his calloused thumb coming up to stroke over your jaw, the intimate touch sending fireworks through your nervous system, ”though I don’t want to disrespect your work ethic, I’d like to point out that we’re not working on the same project anymore, so if you’d like to -”

The case hit the floor with a loud bang the moment you wrapped your arms around Barnes’s neck and threw yourself into his arms, your lips meeting in a sizzling kiss. Barnes caught you around the waist and hauled you up into his arms, your feet dangling off the ground as he crushed you to his chest, returning the kiss tenfold. 

His tongue was immediately in your mouth this time, licking hot and wet and dominatingly over your own, and you whimpered at the sheer intensity, the way it blazed to a fire in your loins.

You clung to him like your life depended on it, and moaned into his mouth as you felt him turn and lower you to the bench in the lab, not letting much space get in between you before he draped himself over you and continued putting his mouth to yours. Your hands found their agency and started moving, mapping out his shoulders, feeling the muscle ripple under your fingertips as you caressed down his chest and around his sides to stroke his long, chiseled back.

His loose cotton shirt rode up as he moved to step further in between your opening legs, pressing himself closer, and your hands were unable to resist the pull as your fingers met the hot flesh of his lower back, stroking over silky smooth skin up again under his shirt. 

His whole body shuddered against you, a small gasp emanating from him as he broke the kiss, and your excitement went through the roof. You opened your eyes and stared at his expression going lax, eyes closing and mouth hanging slightly open as you continued your caress up his back. You hooked your hands over his shoulder and pulled him down to you again, nibbling on his lip before kissing his open mouth, your fingertips dancing in swirling patterns down his back. 

His body shuddered again. 

“Oh my god,” he whispered a little breathlessly against your mouth, mostly to himself it seemed, and your discovery made you almost feverish with desire. 

He was sensitive, and probably more than a little touch-starved. 

You brought your hands forward and found the top button on his shirt, staring to undo it as you breathed into each other's mouths. You’d gotten to the third one when Barnes gave a (admittedly adorable) little huff of impatience and pulled free to wrench his shirt over his head, revealing a sculpted torso right out of your wettest dream. You had to take a moment just to stare at him, hard abs, flat stomach, pecs that stretched into rounded, muscled, obscenely broad shoulders. Tight, sculpted muscles that shone in the dimmed, bluish fluorescents of the ceiling lights, one muscled arm with prominent veins running down to a calloused hand, one arm reflecting the lights in shiny, sculpted, black vibranium.

His chest rose and fell with his labored breath, his abs flexing, the muscles of his torso and arms tensing and shifting as he stood before you and it was just so different from the statuesque, almost frugal way he’d moved before, when he only exerted energy at the utmost importance. This man was alive in a completely different way. And he was looking at you like he wanted to devour you. 

You’d barely raked your eyes up to his and caught the feral glint in his eyes before he was on you again, ripping your lab coat open and sliding his hands up and down your sides. His touch sent shivers of warmth through you and you moaned into his mouth as he kissed you. That only seemed to spur him on. When his hands slid under the cotton sweater you wore, exploring the folds and dips of your abdomen, you shuddered. He was touching you like he hadn’t touched anyone before, all curious and explorative with just the hint of inexperienced clumsiness, fingers curious for such a mundane thing as the fold of skin over your ribcage as you lay there crouched beneath him. 

Bast, you needed more, his touch sending you into a frenzy. You wanted him, all of him. 

You started awkwardly extracting your arms from your lab coat, and when Barnes caught on, he was more than willing to help you shed it before his fingers went to the hem of your sweater. He paused then, and looked into your eyes for permission. You nodded, a bit eagerly perhaps, but whatever. 

He slowly slid the fabric of your sweater up your torso, and in a move more gentle than you’d anticipated from the way he removed his own clothes, he bent down and tentatively kissed your stomach - right on your tummy, soft kisses following the fabric up. It stole your breath away as you watched the movement avidly. 

He pushed the fabric all the way up over your bra, and reached with a curious hand to tug the cup down, revealing a hardened nipple. You were nearly shaking with want at this point, and shuddered embarrassingly hard when he took the nipple in his mouth and swiped his hot, wet tongue on it, nibbling gently and curiously with his teeth until you shuddered again.

You let your hands wander and found his hair, finally, finally getting to feel the soft, straight locks of hair sift through them, basking in the opportunity after having snuck peaks at it for months. It was even silkier than you’d imagined, despite its shaggy appearance. You combed your hands through his hair as he moved to suck on your other nipple, pulling the cup of your bra down to free your breast to the open air of the room. 

Scraping your nails over his scalp, you felt the way his form trembled atop you, and he almost purred, a deep, rumbling groan vibrating through you and into the very bench beneath you. You scraped over his scalp again and bit your lip as it elicited another rumble.

He let your nipple go, puffy and a shade darker than usual from his bullying, and you watched the string of saliva connect it to his lips with a blush burgeoning on your face. Oh, this might get filthy, you thought to yourself, almost embarrassed by how much you liked it when he closed the distance between you and licked into your mouth again, seemingly not caring about his spit getting everywhere, the kiss messy and wet. 

There was a tell-tale hard bulge pressing against the heated spot between your legs, and you rolled your hips down on it. Barnes gasped out of the kiss, looking almost shocked as he quickly looked down between your bodies to where he was pressed against you, and you wondered if he might’ve forgotten where all of these horny urges came from. You rolled your hips into him again, experimentally, and watched as realization hit him, as his eyelids drooped and a tiny groan escaped him. Then he rolled his hips to meet yours and it was your time to groan. 

“Just like that,” you whispered encouragingly, and met his gaze as he returned his eyes to yours, watching you intently as he rolled his hips again and again, grinding himself between your legs. 

He felt…big, to say the least, and he was grinding against your clothed clit in a way that you knew had you gushing into your panties. You could already feel the fabric getting soggy, sliding along your flesh as Barnes widened his step and grinded against you with more grounded precision. 

Fuck, it felt so good it was getting hard to think, and when his - oh god - vibranium hand slid down your side to grab your hip, effortlessly pinning you down into the bench so he could grind even harder against your core, the breath in your lungs fucking punched out of you. You knew just how much strength was packed into that metal arm. Knew there was a fine line between using too much strength and keeping you pinned firmly enough so you couldn’t move your hips an inch. Barnes traversed that line perfectly. 

Your pussy was on fire, the grinds of Bucky’s big, hard bulge against your clit too much while - simultaneously - the layers of clothes between you made it somehow not enough. It had been so long since you’d just frotted, clothed, like this, and you now wondered how you could’ve forgotten how fucking good it felt - or if it’d ever felt this good at all before. You seriously doubted it, for you couldn’t really believe it, but the rhythm and weight of Bucky's hips while his mouth lowered to mouth at your neck was somehow actually propelling you towards the edge. 

You tried to move your hips to grind back, to make him go faster, harder, but found yourself utterly - and deliciously - fully at his mercy as he nuzzled the crook of your neck and laved his tongue on your skin, tasting it in that fascinating curiosity of his. 

Fuck, it was right there, you could feel it, he was gonna make you come, you just needed a little more. 

Through the haze of your impending, building release, you could hear yourself start to whimper. Needy and a little embarrassing, the sounds escaping you despite you biting your lip and clutching at Barnes’s shoulders, barely holding on as he hurled you towards that precipice.

His face suddenly appeared from the crook of your neck, and it took you a second to realize he had a look of confused concern on his face as he looked down on you. 

To your utter distress, his hips slowed their steady, hard thrust against yours, and he gave you a once over you had a hard time understanding. Then it hit you that he must be concerned he’d done something wrong; that he’d mistaken your sounds of need for ones of pain or that you didn’t want it or something utterly ridiculous like that. Sweet, respectful, slightly confused and apparently wildly inexperienced man, you thought with an almost woeful endearment. You could feel yourself slipping further under the power of his spell as his eyes returned to your face, flitting about to try and decipher your expression.

That elusive orgasm you were dancing up to started to slip away as his hips grinded to a halt, and you reached out to cradle his face in near panic. 

“No, please, please, please don’t stop. It’s so good, please,” you practically whined, trying to move your own hips to get more of that sweet, intoxicating friction. You barely managed a little squiggle under the pinning strength of his hand on your hip and his body on top of yours.

A great gust of breath whooshed out of him, and he started up his rhythm again almost immediately, meeting your tiny writhing with thrusts of his own like he just couldn’t help it, and you threw your head back, biting your lip and nodding frantically as the pleasure built inside you again, picking up just behind where you’d left off. 

His hand, the one of flesh, slid up your torso to caress the exposed column of your neck, almost curiously, exploring, holding it in an almost tender grip as you moaned in delirium. His thrust grew harder, your moans louder and his hand gripped harder like he enjoyed the feeling of your moans being forced from you by his moving hips. 

You could tell the moment he started climbing his own precipice, how his movement grew more focused, more intent, leaving all exploration behind to chase a goal with an almost singular, feral possession. His breaths turned to gasps, which turned to grunts and then low growls. His movement turned frantic, almost feral in their one mindedness. He was losing himself to the pleasure and you whined, mind turning to slush under the onslaught of his ferocity. You were going dumb on his cock and he hadn’t even taken it out of his pants. Didn’t matter, you were done for. 

The wild, animalistic abandon with which he chased his own high was so blastingly hot it sent you tumbling over the edge almost entirely on its own. You gasped, your body tensing and then exploding under his as his grinding thrusts sent wave upon wave of searing, orgasmic bliss crashing into you, riding you so hard you nearly passed out. 

Your sight went blurry, blood roaring in your ears, but you heard the moment his breath caught in his throat, such a vulnerable sound, and then the bulge pressed to the sticky, clothed cunt between your legs started throbbing in an uneven, staccato rhythm, which you could feel against you even through the layers of clothing separating you. His grip turned to bruising steel and you gasped anew as the intensity of the pain mixed with your abating orgasm, making a shocking, intoxicating cocktail of sensation blast through you. 

He threw his head back, the thick column of his neck stretching taut, and growled like he was in pain, and it sent vibration straight through you down to the table beneath you. Fuck, he was like nothing you’d ever experienced - pure, raw power, lust, shocking honesty and a sense of almost ardent fascination - mixed together in this anomaly and mystery of a man.

It felt like several minutes passed as you tried to catch your breath and gather your mind from where it’d melted out of your ears to puddle on the bench around you. Bucky’s face had made its way into the crook of your neck, where he seemed just as slow and sluggish to come back down to earth. He was like a furnace on top of you, even hotter from his exertion, forehead damp and hot where it pressed to the sensitive skin of your neck. 

His weight on you was a comforting one though, making you feel safe and protected, covered and nestled into a cocoon of muscles and warmth and soft, puffing breaths. Taking a cheeky chance, you carded a hand through his hair, the brown strands soft, glinting in the fluorescents above as they shifted through your fingers. Bucky’s whole form shivered as you raked your fingernails along his scalp, and the bulge nestled tight between your thighs and his body throbbed once as he grunted softly, neck twisting to push his head into your hand, almost like a cat rubbing against your palm to get more scritches. 

A chuckle left your mouth as you kept carding your hand through Bucky’s hair. He looked up at you then, and the moment caught up with you. A blush had the audacity of spreading on your cheeks even after everything you’d just done. He looked into your eyes, silent but for your deep, still slightly labored breaths. You couldn’t help smiling. 

He looked a little dazzled for a moment, then a slow, beautiful smile spread on his own lips to answer yours.

"Um, it's been a long time, and I d-don't remember much, but I'm pretty sure this is not how you court a lady properly," he said a bit self-deprecatingly. You chuckled again, and he joined, his form vibrating with myrth. He made no move to get off you though. You wrapped your arms around his neck.

"I don't know, this doesn't feel too bad," you said, and you could practically feel the relief in Bucky as he let you keep him laying draped across you.

"Still. I'd like to take you out sometime. It was the real reason I came here, after all," he said.

You felt your smile turn wry.

"I thought you said you had errands...and whatnots," you said.

His gaze wavered for only a moment as he realized he'd revealed his own bluff. Then his smile grew sheepish, and so warm it sizzled.

[earlgreytea68]

So I was like, Why can't I find any footage of the Magic 8 Ball song? What did Patrick play for the piano medley?? I eventually gave up and went to look at the set list.

And at first I was like, ...they played Bang the Doldrums for the Magic 8 Ball song? That's it? All Patrick played was Golden?

And then I paused and repeated those sentences to myself: They played Bang the Doldrums. Patrick played Golden.

Like, if you had shown me this set list a year ago, I would have told you it was an impossible Fall Out Boy set list. They played Dead on Arrival? Calm Before the Storm?? I remember the first time they played Calm Before the Storm on this album cycle, I almost fell out of my chair when it started, it was so shocking. Hum Hallelujah into Headfirst Slide????? Another song we absolutely COULD NOT BELIEVE when they first played it live, it was so shocking that Pete told the crowd he expected faces to melt off. Then they played Golden and Bang the Doldrums and THOSE ARE SONGS I SHRUGGED OFF????? They have now played these songs so often that they barely registered as things they were playing until I stopped and thought: They played BANG THE DOLDRUMS??? When I joined this fandom, that song had such mythos around the idea that they would never play it live and now they clearly love to play it live, they trot it out all the time.

And it occurred to me, as I contemplated all of this, that this was, in fact, probably the point of the astonishing summer tour they went through. They have already detonated most of the emotional bombshells of their career, and now they can just...play them. Like, that's the wonder of what they did: They unlocked their entire catalog, embraced all of it, in one shocking six-week dash through their history. We called it the tour of healing, and this is what it means to be healed: to come out on the other side of the apocalypse and casually slide Hum Hallelujah into Headfirst Slide, with Golden and Bang the Doldrums lurking in the wings, and it's no longer a big deal because it's healed, the way that that broken bone from the summer you were 12 is no longer a big deal anymore. It may twinge from time to time when the weather gets iffy, but by and large, it's just another of your bones again.

It's amazing, what this band has done for itself. They smashed all of the walls they'd put up around the tender vulnerable parts, they dragged them out into the light...and they not only survived, they thrived. Now they just play them, because everything they have ever been is something for them to cherish now, nothing for them to hide away.

And at the end of the day, Pete Wentz leaned his elbow on Patrick Stump and wiggled to the beat of their love song. Their throughline through the whole thing, and it was there for them again last night, at the end of an extraordinary set list that they have made feel ordinary. How lovely for them, to once again be at "Saturday," and for the ordinariness of all of it to be as ever the most extraordinary part for them: me and Pete, once again, one more time, forward into their future. "Saturday," still there for all of us the way at the end of the day the way it has been for twenty years now. Nothing could be more ordinary at the end of a Fall Out Boy show. How utterly extraordinary.

[osunism]

Summary: A young widowed sorceress seeks protection under the aegis of the Honored One, but he has a better idea for keeping her out of the clutches of her dangerous clan.

Warnings: Gojo might be a lil' toxic, there's some smut in this story [a lot actually the attraction is pretty instant], and it's already on AO3 if that's the format you prefer.

I.

     Protection details are light work—usually. Gojo hasn’t failed a mission since the Star Plasma fiasco in high school, and even that had been an extraordinary circumstance. It is rare that one crosses his desk, requiring at most a first grade sorcerer for success, so when the Higher Ups call him directly to assign him to protect another sorcerer—a foreigner, no less—he gets curious. And when Gojo gets curious, he starts investigating.

     The dossier alone was enough to spark his interest, from the woman’s name to the information about her background. An entire clan of sorcerers living abroad! It is one of the rare instances of sorcerers being born outside Japan, and he wonders if even that is more xenophobic mythos perpetuated by the conservatives pulling the strings in the jujutsu world. Not only is the woman he’s to protect from a sorcerer clan—and a powerful one at that—she is essentially royalty.

     What intrigues him is that she was married to a non-sorcerer. Some nobody named Jin Hayashi. He was killed in a car accident a year prior, and since then his widow, Asabé Hayashi, has been living in seclusion in a modest house in the suburbs. He’s even more surprised that she is not far from the school…and that he has not once sensed her cursed energy.

     He learns why when she arrives at Jujutsu Tech for the first time.

     After his meeting and acceptance of the mission, Gojo finds her in his office, and for a moment he watches her. Her back is to him, and the first thing he notes is how…delicate she looks. He catches a glimpse of her profile: burnished sienna skin, a sculpted nose, and full lips. Her eyes are the color of honey, and her lashes are black and full, curling on her cheek like the crests of waves.

     “Do you mean to stare at me all morning?” Her voice is soft but sultry, like smoke or fog flowing over the serene architecture of a zen garden. Gojo watches her through his blindfold a while longer, his smile unwavering, although it curls a little more at her words. He comes in, shutting the door behind him.

     “It’s an old habit,” he says without missing a beat. “I like to read the room before entering. Kind of an essential skill in my line of work.”

     Asabé does not smile, even as Gojo comes around to sit at his desk, and he gets a good look at her. If he wasn’t staring before, he’s staring now.

     Asabé Hayashi is one of the most beautiful women he has ever seen. Even to say it does not do her justice. She is striking, and he finds himself ignoring the usual analysis of his Six Eyes in favor of just looking at her. The woman is a fucking knockout and he’s seen her dead husband. Gojo is wondering how a plain nobody like Jin Hayashi won the hand of foreign royalty. He’s also wondering how long it’ll take him to talk this woman into—

     “You are Satoru Gojo, I presume,” she says. “I was told that you could help me with my problem.”

     “That’s what they tell me,” Gojo says, trying not to sound breathless. God she’s incredible. Her face alone is a work of art. He wants to trace those perfect brows with his thumb, those high cheekbones, and that mouth.

     “So,” he says, even as part of his thoughts turn decidedly not wholesome or businesslike. “Assassins! Sounds exciting. But I’ve a few questions of my own before we continue. My bosses were a little vague on the details so you’ll forgive me if this sounds redundant.” He doesn’t sound the least bit regretful but she looks at him, impassive, gesturing for him to continue.

     “You’re a sorceress,” he says, watches her stiffen a little at the simple statement. Very interesting. “And from my understanding, you have a powerful inherited technique, and a powerful sorcerer clan. Why not go to them for protection? And what is stopping you from protecting yourself?”

     Asabé’s beautiful mouth thins into a grim line.

     “Gojo, my family is the one sending their enforcers after me,” she says and his brows go up in mild surprise. “And as for why I cannot protect myself…it is because of a binding vow.”

     Gojo nods, understanding.

     “Does this vow forbid you from using your technique?”

     “Only against my family,” Asabé explains. “A long time ago, my clan was nearly wiped out because of vicious infighting. As a way to prevent this from happening in the future, my ancestors made a binding vow forbidding their descendants from ever turning our gifts against one another. As you can expect, it has led to some very creative ways for more ambitious members of the clan to rise in the ranks.”

     Gojo snorts. “I wouldn’t know, but I’ll take your word for it. So, you’ve got a family who wants to kill you, but why? Your technique is valuable, why lose it by killing you?”

     Asabé blinks, visibly confused. Then, she gasps.

     “Ah, I see, it must have been lost in translation. No, they are not trying to kill me. They are trying to drag me back home.”

     And all at once, Gojo understands.

     “You’re hiding from them.”

     Asabé says nothing, but he sees the tension in her jaw, the hard swallow in her throat, and the way her honey-hued eyes harden in cold fury.

     “Yes,” she admits, and he can see how it nettles and stings her pride to do so. “It is why I have sealed my cursed energy to make it more difficult for them to locate me. But…living in Japan, I still stand out, as you can see.”

     Gojo laughs. “Miss Hayashi did you just make a joke? I do believe the ice is finally beginning to thaw!”

     “Gojo…” she says, and her voice sounds like a purr and a growl all at once. He takes a moment to try not thinking about how that voice would sound panting and moaning in his ear, saying things so obscene it would make the devil himself blush with shame. He really needs to get laid soon, but since seeing her he’s been thinking about it. God she’s fucking gorgeous.

     She clears her throat, rather conspicuously.

     “In any case,” she continues, “it’s simply more prudent to tap in with a community that can offer me protection. It’s not like I can go to the police about this kind of thing.”

     Gojo knows all about demanding families. Not that his is very demanding—he does as he pleases, but he also knows what’s expected of him. No, he suspects Asabé’s family is not unlike the Zenin clan. For that alone, he spares her some pity. He can’t imagine being seen as nothing but a potential brood mare for more heirs. No wonder she ran off to marry a nobody. Probably vastly preferable to being sequestered away to pop out babies.

     “Well, we have a few options,” Gojo says. “We can keep you here, at Jujutsu Tech. Tengen’s barriers are ancient and powerful, and we’ve vast resources if you want to study, meditate, whatever you want to do to pass the time. You also wouldn’t be required to seal yourself. But, you would be required to stay on the grounds in order to remain protected. I also won’t always be here to keep an eye on you, which I’m sure is counterintuitive to your request.”

     Asabé’s brow furrows as she considers his words. Gojo waits patiently, studying how her blood races in her veins, her pulse quickens, her heart rate rises. She’s running through all the scenarios in her head, he can feel that much. He knows without having to ask that she’s afraid to remove the seal and reveal herself, but he’s so perishingly curious about how powerful she actually is. Part of him really wants to know if this woman’s ability is worth his protection.

     Asabé’s gaze clears as she blinks, having weighed that option. He can already tell she doesn’t want to be confined to the campus. He doesn’t blame her. As secluded and protected as this place is, it has been breached many times before by highly skilled sorcerers. He has no idea what enforcers her family has at their disposal, but if they’re on equal footing with his family’s wealth and influence, he suspects curse users will be making their way here in no time. And he’s not always on the campus grounds.

     He briefly remembers Riko, and his smile almost fades.

     “What’s the other option?” Asabé asks, breaking the silence. Gojo sits back in his chair.

     “Well, the other option is you would be staying with me.” He tries not to look smug but the thought of this lovely creature walking around his home is…tempting. The circumstances being what they are, he can hardly be blamed for being a tad excited, right?

     Asabé’s eyes go wide.

     “Is…” Her voice wavers a little. “Is that appropriate?”

     Gojo turns out his hands in a shrug. “Does it matter? I’ve got a spare bedroom if you’re worried. And I can guarantee your safety more that way. Trust me, there’s nowhere safer in this whole country save for Hokkaido.”

     Asabé considers it. She has no intention of freezing her ass off in Hokkaido for the rest of her life. She frowns again, clearly not liking the idea of being roommates with the man who is essentially her bodyguard for the duration of her ordeal. Her gaze slides away, and she bites her lip. Gojo has a brief image of her doing that with his mouth on her throat.

     He really needs to get laid. Fuck.

     “Fine,” she says, terse and exasperated. “Do I have to wear the seal there too?”

     Gojo shrugs. “You don’t. But if it makes you feel better you can keep it on. I have to admit I am curious about your technique, though.”

     Asabé’s cheeks go warm and she looks away again.

     “It’s not relevant to your mission, and I try not to use it if I don’t have to.”

     “Your choice,” Gojo says nonchalantly. “So, shall I send someone to pick up whatever you need and have it brought over, or are you averse to that too?”

     Asabé frowns again, glaring at him.

     “I am not going to risk revealing myself if I don’t have to, Gojo,” she says sternly. “But yes: I would appreciate having my things brought to your…residence. Will I be confined there or am I allowed to come and go?”

     “How about we cross that bridge when we come to it?” Gojo suggests. “And trust me: it won’t feel at all like house arrest once you’re there. I’ve been told I’m pretty entertaining to be around.”

     Asabé stares at him, clearly unamused. Gojo lets out a little scoff. Sheesh. Tough crowd.

     When Asabé first meets Gojo her initial thought is that this lanky, arrogant, nonchalant idiot cannot possibly protect her. However, his cursed energy speaks volumes and then some. She felt him behind her before she deigned to turn her head and get a glimpse of him. And she is pretty sure that blindfold does absolutely nothing to hinder his sight. She wagers he’s got better eyesight than a fucking owl.

     And even his eyes could not discern her technique, meaning the seal she has placed on herself is working.

     After her meeting with Gojo, he makes a few calls, getting his staff on the job of moving her into the guest bedroom of his penthouse apartment overlooking the sprawl of the Tokyo metropolis from the safety of a quiet building nestled in the hills of the city’s outer limits. Asabé gets her first glimpse of the building during the drive: a sleek and modern high-rise of highly reflective glass. It’s the kind of place one imagines their future dark romance novel hero resides.

     In other words: it’s exactly how she imagined Gojo’s choice of residence would be.

     They enter the building together, greeted by a vigilant doorman who bows low to Gojo, holding the door open for both of them. Asabé ignores how the doorman looks askance at her out the corner of his eye, and she makes sure to give him her most impervious and imperious stare as the elevator doors close. She feels grim satisfaction as her withering look makes the doorman avert his gaze quickly and guiltily.

     The ascent is a silent one, broken only by Gojo unwrapping Jolly Ranchers to suck on. Out of the corner of her eye, she studies him. His skin is like alabaster, his hair as pale as starlight, but he keeps that damnable blindfold on so she can’t see his eyes. She wonders briefly if his eyes are sensitive to light. Back in her homeland, it is not uncommon for powerful sorcerers to develop physical ailments, especially considering how a lot of sorcerers suffer from brain damage when overusing techniques.

     Still, for as silly as his blindfold looks to her, she has no doubt he can see quite clearly.

     “Now who’s staring, hm?” Gojo says slyly, his smile becoming a smirk. Asabé’s cheeks go hot and she wishes she wore her sunglasses so she could stare in peace. Even then, she’s sure Gojo’s senses are superhuman.

     “I was just…” She struggles to find words because there are none to say. She was staring, even out of her peripheral vision, she was marveling. She’s heard of Gojo’s good looks, as well as the reputation those looks entail. And now she’s exiting an elevator into his penthouse. Once they cross the threshold, she feels nervous, as if she doesn’t belong here.

     Everything about Gojo’s apartment is sleek and modern, although there are trappings of tradition amidst the decor, and she can feel something inside her dim and muted as she crosses the threshold. She hesitates. Gojo looks over his shoulder.

     “You can remove your seal if you like,” he says casually, “this place is highly secure against cursed intrusions. It’s also insulated in case I have to get a little crazy. Can’t destroy the place in a fit of pique.”

     Asabé’s hand goes to her chest, and Gojo can see the seal nestled there beneath her clothes. A necklace? How simple…and curious. As they remove their shoes, he leads her through the kitchen, giving her the grand tour. It is extremely rare that he brings anyone to his personal home, even rarer that he brings them to the ancestral Gojo estate. Still, he doubts her intentions are to bring him harm. She seems skittish, her eyes seeming to be expecting attackers to jump out from behind the next corner.

     “And here’s you,” Gojo says, leading her to the guest bedroom. Asabé peers inside. It’s lavish in comparison to say, a hotel or motel, but it is no less than what she expects from a man like Gojo. The bed is large, facing a wall of floor-to-ceiling windows that overlook a sprawling green space and beyond the carpet of lights that is Tokyo proper, and there’s even a walk-in closet. She smiles, seeing that her things have already been dropped off for her to unpack at her leisure.

     “My room is down the hall,” Gojo explains. “I’m here when I’m not working or teaching, and since you are the job, looks like I get to be home way more often than usual. Help yourself to the kitchen—I don’t cook much, but if there’s anything you need please let the concierge know. Groceries get delivered so there’s no need for you to risk going out on your own, and the housekeepers are here once a week to clean. Not much, but it keeps me from getting lost in the clutter of the day to day. Pretty sweet, right?”

     Asabé smiles. “Thank you, Gojo,” she says with a respectful bow. “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your assistance. I’ll try not to get underfoot.”

     Gojo grins. He’s not worried about her getting underfoot but the way she looks right now he wants her to get under him somehow.

     “Let me not keep you,” he says. “Make yourself at home and we can go over your situation in more detail, hm? Maybe order some Thai food. You like Thai food?”

     Asabé smiles, almost shyly. “Thai sounds wonderful. I’ll unpack and freshen up. And again: thank you.”

     As Gojo leaves her, he can see her gaze lingering on his back, curious and hesitant, as if there is more she wishes to say,  but she vanishes into her room, the door shutting softly behind her.

     In the guest room, Asabé takes a moment to really take it all in. Her husband has been dead for almost a full year, and her family has been searching for her relentlessly. She thinks about how everything went so wrong, and dreads being dragged back into bondage. She thinks about how Jin saved her without realizing it, and all he got for his troubles was an early grave.

     Asabé stares out of the windows into the well-manicured park below, and into Tokyo proper, then she begins the long process of unpacking her things. She opts to shower in lieu of simply freshening up, and when she emerges, she feels less weary and more clear-headed. It’s a lovely bathroom, with a deep, freestanding soaking tub, and a shower surrounded by pristine glass. Above the tub is a skylight. She loves that, and anticipates many relaxing bubble baths in the future, staring at the stars. She slips into a short but simple sundress, and pulls her long black hair into a single braid over her shoulder.

     When she emerges from the bedroom, she nearly runs into Gojo.

     “Oh!” She cries, gasping as he catches her by the shoulders. His hands are soft and warm, much larger than hers, and she looks up at him, wide eyed. His blindfold is off, and she glimpses his face for the first time.

     She has never seen such a face, save in the descriptions of angels and their impossible beauty. She stares, momentarily stunned. His eyes are indescribable to her, a blue that defies explanation, as if they are living pieces of the cosmos. His hands tighten on her shoulders only slightly as her gaze slowly studies his face. His mouth is soft and pink, and he’s not smiling, but nor does he look unhappy.

     “I’m sorry…” She whispers, trying to find her voice and wondering why it’s so small. Gojo tilts his head forward, those eyes studying her in full as he smiles.

     “Do I make you nervous?” He asks, his voice rich and deep, and Asabé shivers in response, unable to help herself. No, not nervousness, but something she’s not quite ready to confront. Slowly, oh so slowly, Gojo releases her shoulders, and she takes a small step back. It’s his turn to study her.

     Her dress is beautiful, but Gojo thinks this only because it looks good on her. The straps are so delicate, as if they are made to be slipped from her shoulders. He can see the the swell of her breasts beneath, and spots the thin gold chain around her neck, and the seal hanging from it.

     It’s her wedding band, he realizes. The seal is her wedding band.

     “You’ve been sealing yourself since your marriage?” Gojo asks. Asabé nods quietly.

     “It was the only way I could live here peacefully,” she says softly. “Jin didn’t know. I…I had the ring ensorcelled by a curse user who specializes in seals. It wasn’t cheap, but it worked. At least until…”

     Gojo can deduce what happened. Likely the “accident” that befell her husband was no accident at all. He beckons her to follow him and they make their way to the living room, which is surprisingly spacious. So much of the apartment is so open that it does make her nervous. She wonders if this design is his choice. It doesn’t feel very secure.

     They sit on the couch, with her curling on one end and him sprawling on the other.

     “Tell me about the accident,” he says, and Asabé hesitates. His expression is gentle, almost as if he is compassionate, and she doesn’t understand how he manages to make his eyes—so striking!—soft. She has not spoken to anyone about the accident since it happened, but if he can find any answers within, she’s more than willing to revisit it.

     “We were driving,” she begins. “Visiting his parents in Toyama. It was storming terribly, and we’d been arguing. His mother is—was—not very fond of our marriage. We were taking one of the mountain roads and…he couldn’t see the cursed spirit but I could. I tried to warn him…but he wouldn’t listen.”

     Asabé shuts her eyes, remembering.

     “It pulled us into its domain, but only briefly, and it was enough. The car hit something in the domain, sent us both crashing through the windshield.”

     This next part, Asabé hates to remember.

     “Both of us were horribly injured and dying. I could see my…I was torn open. So was he.”

     A dress of red, a skin of gray.

     “You survived using reversed curse technique,” Gojo surmises, his voice quiet and thoughtful. Asabé nods.

     “I can’t control it,” she tells him, “I didn’t even know I could do it until that moment. I just knew I didn’t want either of us to die, but I couldn’t save him. He died right in front of me.”

     “And the cursed spirit?” Gojo asks.

     Asabé fingers the ring around her neck with her slender fingertips.

     “I unsealed myself for the first time since leaving my family, and I exorcised the spirit myself. And then I called for help.”

     Gojo remembers reading about the accident during his personal briefing of Hayashi’s background. So a cursed spirit caused the accident, hm? And her unsealing herself means whoever her family sent to spy on her and hunt her down must have finally pinpointed her location.

     “Can you unseal yourself, now?” He asks. Asabé freezes, wide-eyed.

     “Gojo…” She whispers. “If I do that—”

     “They won’t find you,” he says. “Trust me. Go on, unseal yourself. I’m sure keeping your cursed energy suppressed like that can’t possibly be comfortable. And I need to see what you’re made of because if you exorcised a spirit on your own, you’re clearly not a weakling. Let your hair down, Miss Hayashi.”

     He winks, and her cheeks flush hot.

     “If…if you’re sure…” She says softly, and grasps the chain around her neck, lifting it over her head.

     All at once a great weight on her soul is lifted and she watches Gojo’s expression. He is still smiling but there’s a sharpness to his gaze, his pupils shrinking, and she remembers what she knows about the Gojo clan’s techniques. Six Eyes and Limitless…she’s not sure what either of them are capable of, but from his silence, she knows they are in use.

     Gojo has never felt cursed energy like hers before. Usually, the Six Eyes tells him everything from vitals to near-clairvoyant readings on moves everyone around him is making. He can see her cursed energy, a flame of the deepest cerulean he’s ever seen. Same color of his eyes if he were to venture a guess. It’s beautiful and it is so tightly controlled he knows she’s been trained, formally in fact. He focuses his gaze, chases the path of her cursed energy, and sees the brightness along her throat. Cursed speech? He tilts his head, curious.

     “You have exemplary control over your cursed energy,” he says by way of acknowledging her. “What about your technique? If your family wants you back this badly it has to be pretty powerful.

     Asabé hesitates again. “I…I hesitate to use it. It can be…overwhelming.”

     Gojo smirks, smug and superior.

     “I promise you can’t hurt me. Go ahead and try.”

     “I don’t want to hurt you,” she says and Gojo raises a brow. Most techniques are made to hurt or defend, he can’t imagine what power she has that could be for anything else. He gestures for her to continue. Asabé holds his gaze a moment longer, before she shuts her eyes. Without telling her, Gojo releases his infinity. He needs to feel her. God, he needs to stop staring at that brightness on her beautiful throat. He wants to trace a wet path with his tongue along it, feel how warm that satiny brown skin is.

     “You can’t hurt me.”

     “But I can.”

     Gojo lets out an involuntary gasp as he feels the sensation of…it feels like nails digging into his shoulders and forearms, yet Asabé remains curled on the couch, serene as can be.

     “How…?” He begins to ask and even though Asabé is no longer speaking he can see the brightness around her throat, still active. The nails are still digging into his skin like a lover clinging to him, and he activates his technique to repel it. He glances down, seeing no marks in his skin, but he can feel echoes of the sensation. The brightness in her throat dims.

     “Cursed speech?” He wonders. Asabé smiles thinly, replacing her seal. Her cursed energy goes mute, but Gojo has seen and tasted it and he will never forget it.

     “In a sense,” she says and Gojo cannot help but brace himself for another ghost sensation. “We do not have the precise power that the Inumaki clan does, where we must speak words that compel. Rather, it is our very voices that inspire sensation: pleasure, pain, and everything in between. With enough effort, I can make you hallucinate.”

     Gojo can’t help it: he’s smiling. He’s delighted. What a fascinating power, and a dangerous one. Compulsion is one thing, and the energy is not as precise hence why it can backfire so easily depending on how powerful the opponent is, but this? She can speak any word and empower it with whatever she wants her opponents to feel.

     “How did you exorcise the spirit?” He asks.

     “I sang,” Asabé says simply. Gojo laughs.

     “What like a lullaby? Did you put it to sleep or something?” He’s laughing still and Asabé frowns, rolling her eyes.

     “No, I sang until it was torn apart at the seams. It’s not just nails I can make you feel, Gojo.”

     Something about the way she says that makes all the blood rush to his cock. The possibilities of her voice hadn’t occurred to him until now. God, if he unseals her and fucks her, he can only imagine—

     “Yes,” Asabé says, looking amused as she watches him. “Even that.”

     Gojo grins. “I can’t imagine since you decided to seal yourself. Can you control it?”

     Asabé has the wherewithal to look indignant.

     “Of course.” She says through gritted teeth. “I’d not be much use as an heir if I couldn’t control my own technique. I only sealed myself to hide from my family.”

     Gojo leans back, casual and unbothered, and Asabé tries not to think about how good he looks, about the way his button-down is unbuttoned enough to show the beautiful column of his throat, the hollow of his clavicle, and just a peek of his chest. She thinks about how warm his hands are, how gentle he was when he held her shoulders. She bites her lip. Gojo can see it in her, her blood is racing through the pipes of her veins, her heartbeat picking up into a slightly fevered cadence. Her lips part, and her breath comes a little rushed.

     Oh, she’s turned on. Good, he shouldn’t be the only one sitting here wondering what she’ll look like with her ankles in her ears and his dick buried to the hilt inside of her. And her voice unsealed? Oh he knows that’s dangerous. He can always stuff her panties in her mouth but—

     “Stop looking at me like that,” she says. Gojo blinks, grinning like a wolf.

     “Like what?”

     “Like you’re thinking about having me with a side of fries,” she says. “Speaking of, you mentioned Thai food?”

     Gojo laughs. “So I did. Let’s eat and maybe we can both stop looking at each other like a couple of rival lions at the drinking pool, hm?”

     Her cheeks flush again, and this time she looks away from him.

Masterlist 🧿 Next Chapter

© 2024 Hajara Asiri. Do NOT copy, translate, plagiarize, repost anywhere without permission [reblogging posts is okay]. I only upload on Tumblr, AO3, and FFN.

[mihrsuri]

Children Of A Golden World

In following a legendary age - an age in which the leaders of that age lived up to their mythos and in point of fact, far surpassed it - how might you build your own lives? All the children of King Thomas I and Queen Mihrimah faced this question in their own ways and while they are not their parents (for who could be) they are still in their own ways, extraordinary people.

(A Study Of Royal Childhood Post The Great Settlement: 1533-1600)

Turhan/Thomas (b 1556): Turhan Prince Of England. Crown Prince Of Albion. Prince Tom. Hani. King Thomas II. Turhan The Just. His Most Gracious & Faithful Servant Of Allah. The Infidel Half Breed.

Maryam (b. 1559): Maryam, Princess Of England, Princess May. Meri. Empress of Persia. The Wise And Just Empress Maryam. My Most Beloved Rose Of A Wife.

Suleiman (b. 1562): Suleiman Prince of England. Prince Sul. Little Bear. My Little Magnificent. Duke of Oxford. The Second Son. Warrior Of The White Rose.

Halim/Henry (b. 1565): Henry Prince Of England. Prince Hal. My Most Wise Cousin. Grand Vizier To Sultan Mehmed III. Pasha of the Ottoman Empire. Little Hal. Halim.

Ayşe/Anne (b. 1570): Ayşe Princess Of England. The Thorny Twin. Little Tiger Cub. Sharp Tongued Poet. Ani. Beloved Lady Of My Lady Exeter.

Esther (b.1570): Esther Princess Of England. The Sweet Twin. Little Petal. Duchess of Cambridge. Gentle One. Flower Of England. The Jews Wife. The Halfbreed.

[whimsyandbooks]

The Hurricane Wars: A Stellar 10/10 True Enemies to Lovers Adventure In "The Hurricane Wars" by Thea Guanzon, the lush tale of a fantastical realm is vividly portrayed. Within this richly woven narrative, the story revolves around Talasyn, the last known light weaver on the continent, and Alaric, the formidable Prince of Kesath and an adept Shadow Weaver. Their world, torn apart by the devastating power of storms wielded by ships, is brought to life with intricate detail. As their paths collide and their magic clashes in unexpected ways, a tale of profound enmity, unexpected alliances, and the delicate balance between love and hate unfolds. Against the backdrop of a nation, Sarodivia, struggling under the oppressive rule of Kesath, these characters come alive, their complexities adding layers to a story that weaves together themes of identity, freedom, and the intricate dance between darkness and light. Join Talasyn and Alaric on a mesmerizing journey where the battlegrounds of the heart mirror the stormy conflicts of their world.

The story begins in the heart of Sarodivia, a nation ravaged by the power and greed of Kesath, whose ships wield the power of storms, giving rise to the name The Hurricane Wars. Talasyn, a Sardovian orphan, emerges as last known light weaver on the continent, her very existence a testament to a power believed long ago eradicated by Kesath. Her nemesis is Alaric, the Prince of Kesath, and a powerful shadow weaver, becomes joined in her fate. When their magic clashes, an unexpected confluence happens between light and dark, and their lives become intertwined in ways neither ever expected. This leads them to the secluded vibrant world of Nenavar, inspired by the Philippines, where even the dragons draw from South-Asian mythology. War-time weddings really are all the rage. Guanzon crafts a complex tale of identity, ancestral Mythologies, the fight for freedom, the nuances of nationhood, along with the passionate tension between love and hate that hinges the precarious balance of the fate of the world.

Guanzon's writing style is eloquent and lush, painting detailed pictures with her words. The pacing keeps readers engaged, although I found myself slightly thrown off by the absence of a world-changing cataclysmic twist in the final 100 pages. However, this might be due to my recent dive into Sarah J. Maas' books, which are known for their intense plot twists. The end of the book is still incredibly satisfying, as well as perfectly having set the gears in motion for epic twists and turns to happen in the following books of the series. The character development is subtle yet profound; both Talasyn and Alaric learn to navigate their brash hot-headedness and gradually understand each other. Themes of opposites, enemies to lovers, dark vs light, war, politics, and destiny intricately intwine throughout the narrative, creating a captivating tapestry.

The world-building in this book is extraordinary. While it began as an epic fan fiction, Guanzon has masterfully crafted a unique world with intricate political systems, customs, and mythos. Guanzon's academic background in international politics shines through, adding depth and realism rarely seen to the fantastical elements of the story.

The romance in "The Hurricane Wars" is a slow burn of the highest order. Guanzon expertly entwines romance and spice, making the reader cheer for these two oblivious souls falling for each other amidst the chaos.

This book is a treasure for fans of slow-burn enemies-to-lovers stories set in a meticulously crafted fantasy world of magic and politics. I wholeheartedly recommend it, rating it 10/10 stars. "The Hurricane Wars" is an excellent book, a testament to Guanzon’s exceptional writing. I loved it and greedily anticipate the next installment.

[lesbianboyfriend]

if ur into monster theory you should pick up monster portraits. great stuff. bad at explanations so here is the official desc:

Fiction. Art. Hybrid Genre. Relentlessly original and brilliantly hybrid, MONSTER PORTRAITS investigates the concept of the monstrous through a mesmerizing combination of words and images. An uncanny and imaginative autobiography of otherness, it offers the fictional record of a writer in the realms of the fantastic shot through with the memories of a pair of Somali-American children growing up in the 1980s. Operating under the sign of two--texts and drawings, brother and sister, black and white, extraordinary and everyday--MONSTER PORTRAITS multiplies, disintegrates, and blends, inviting the reader to find the danger in the banal, the beautiful in the grotesque. Accumulating into a breathless journey and groundbreaking study, these brief fictions and sketches claim the monster as a fragmentary vastness: not the sum but the derangement of its parts.

Del Samatar's drawings conjure beings who drag worlds in their wake. World Fantasy Award-winning author Sofia Samatar responds with allusive, critical, and ecstatic meditations. Together they have created a secret history of the mixed-race child, a guide to the beasts of an unknown mythos, and a dreamer's iconography. The monstrous never looked so simultaneously haunting and familiar.

[hplovecraftmuseum]

H. P. Lovecraft will probably always be associated with the 'Pulp Magazines' of the 1920s and 30s. However, though the majority of his works appeared in pulp magazines and amateur publications Lovecraft was not a pulp writer by choice. The fact is that the 'pulps' were the only ones who would accept him. Nearly all Lovecraft's friends and fellow writers knew that there was something extraordinary about the man and his fiction. His peers recognized that Lovecraft's works transcended their own and deserved far greater and more serious consideration. Many of the great names in modern horror literature were alive in Lovecraft's day. Quite a few of them outlived him. Yet, Machen, Blackwood, Chambers. Dunsany, M. R. James, etc. Never acknowledged Lovecraft's fiction. Many of them had probably never heard of him. Today Lovecraft has risen to the level of Poe, Vern, and H. G. Wells as a literary figure, but the stain of the pulps will always mark him in the eyes of some. As I see Lovecraft his works are like a diamond in a box of beads and plastic baubles. To the average person that diamond might not be recognized as anything special, at least not at first glance. But to a jeweler, the diamond in the box of paste and plastic beads cannot be overlooked. We have THE CTHULHU MYTHOS, we have the Roll Playing Games, we have the works of other pulp writers who have gained postumous fame. Then we have Lovecraft. The 2 images below Lovecraft's pictures were the work of Gustav Dore'. (Exhibit 446)

[game-boy-pocket]

MAR10 celebration continues and I played through Yoshi's Island.

Technically not a Mario game, as the "Super Mario World 2" subtitle was only tacked on in western regions, but I still count it. It's and important part of the Mario mythos, though I still prefer the Brooklyn origin over this. Two ordinary shmucks from the real world stumbling into something extraordinary and getting in way over their heads is much more appealing to me than them being magical "star children", but that's more of an issue introduced in Yoshi's Island DS than this game.

I have mixed feelings about the Yoshi games but Yoshi's Island remains excellent. I still think the worst thing they've done with Yoshi is remove his ability to store things in his mouth and spit them out. That was his signature feature in SMW, and they made it even better here since you can arc things upward when you spit them out. In later games he just automatically swallows things. A real downgrade.

I normally try to explore all over the place when I play but i'm being honest with myself, I don't like exploring in 2D platformers unless that's their main feature like Super Metroid, I much prefer just doing straight obstacles quickly as I can without dying. So that's the approach I took with playing Yoshi's Island this time and I had a much better time with it than usual, but there are some levels that intentionally slow you down and force you to hunt for a key or some object that helps you get forward, almost all of the Castle levels do this, so the Castles end up as my least favorite parts of the game, though I'll say Yoshi's Island has some of the best bosses in the series.

Anyway, that's it for the SNES games. I probably didn't need to go on about this game as much as I did as I recently finished a run of Yoshi's Island and posted about it here. But oh well.

I think next it's gonna be Mario 64, but not vanilla Mario 64. I'll talk more about that when I finish it.

[pyrasterran]

The girls are fighting

Commissions of Thunder Woman w/ MaxiMaiden II and Aegis

You can order commissions here: https://ko-fi.com/pyrasterran/commissions

[whileiamdying]

What Was So Special About Greta Garbo?

An enigma onscreen and off, the actress only magnified her celebrity by suddenly renouncing it.

By Margaret Talbot December 6, 2021

“If only once I could see a preview and come home feeling satisfied,” Garbo said.Photograph by Edward Steichen © 2021 The Estate of Edward Steichen / ARS, courtesy the George Eastman Museum

Fame is so powerful that renouncing it can seem like the supreme power move. Celebrities who retreat from the public eye (Howard Hughes, J. D. Salinger, Prince) will always be legends, no matter what else they may be. Rumored comebacks tantalize. Paparazzi circle. The mystery deepens. In 1941, at the age of thirty-six, Greta Garbo, one of the biggest box-office draws in the world, stopped acting and, though she lived for half a century more, never made another film. For a star who, more than any other, “invaded the subconscious of the audience,” as Robert Gottlieb writes in his new biography, “Garbo” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), this was an abdication, a privilege of monarchical proportions. But it was also a decision made by one particular, peculiar person who had never been temperamentally suited to celebrity in the first place. There was a reason, beyond the exertions of the Hollywood publicity machine, that a single line she uttered in one movie—“I want to be alone”—became so fused with her image. What can look like a strategy for keeping the public interested can also be a sincere and committed desire to keep it at bay.

Few other performers have ascended as quickly to mononymic status as Garbo did—she started off the way most of us do, with a first and last name, but the first soon fell away, like a spent rocket booster, in the ballyhoo surrounding her. When she appeared in her first sound picture, “Anna Christie,” the ads proclaimed, “Garbo talks!”; for her first sound comedy, “Ninotchka,” it was “Garbo laughs!” Quite why she became such a phenomenon is a puzzle to which film critics and biographers keep returning. Garbo made only twenty-eight movies in her lifetime. (By comparison, Bette Davis made close to ninety, and Meryl Streep has made nearly seventy and still counting.) That slender output could be part of the mystique, compounded by her disappearing act. But Garbo had acquired an enigmatic mythos even before she ended her career—the Hollywood colony treated her like royalty. Nor has it seemed to matter that only a handful of her movies are much watched or admired today.

What Garbo had to offer, above all, was her extraordinary face, at a time when the closeup, with its supercharged intimacy, its unprecedented boon to the emotional and erotic imagination, was still relatively new. Many of the shots credited as the first closeups were unlikely to have set hearts aflame, since they were often of objects—a shoe, a wrench. But filmmakers soon grasped the centripetal seductions of the human face in tight focus. The screenwriter and director Paul Schrader picks as a turning point the moment in a D. W. Griffith film from 1912, “Friends,” in which the camera comes in tight on Mary Pickford’s face, revealing her ambivalence about which of two suitors she should choose. “A real close-up of an actor is about going in for an emotional reason that you can’t get any other way,” Schrader writes. “When filmmakers realized that they could use a close-up to achieve this kind of emotional effect, cameras started coming in closer. And characters became more complex.”

A face as beautiful as Garbo’s—the enormous eyes and deep-set lids, the way love or tenderness or some private, unspoken amusement unknit her brows in an instant, melting her austerity—was almost overwhelming when it filled the screen. She belonged, as Roland Barthes wrote, “to that moment in cinema when the apprehension of the human countenance plunged crowds into the greatest perturbation, where people literally lost themselves in the human image.” This is not to diminish her craft as an actress. But her acting was perhaps most effective in her silent films or in nonverbal scenes in talking pictures in which her face is the canvas for emotion. In the famous last shots of “Queen Christina” (1933), Garbo’s androgynous Swedish ruler stands at the prow of a ship bearing her away from her country; the body of her lover, killed in a duel over her, is laid out on the deck. Garbo stares into the distance, her face a kind of mask but no less eloquent for it. The film’s director, Rouben Mamoulian, had told her that she must “make her mind and heart a complete blank,” empty her face of expression, so that the audience could impose whatever emotions they wanted on it. The scene would then be one of those “marvelous spots,” he said, where “a film could turn every spectator into a creator.”

She was skilled at inciting such projection. More than one contemporary in Hollywood noted that her magic truly showed up only on celluloid, like a ghostly luminescence undetectable until the film was developed. Clarence Brown, who directed Garbo in seven films, recalled shooting a scene with her, thinking it was fine, nothing special, then playing it back and seeing “something that it just didn’t have on the set.” On her face, he said, “You could see thought. If she had to look at one person with jealousy, and another with love, she didn’t have to change her expression. You could see it in her eyes as she looked from one to the other.” Garbo herself, with a kind of arch, adolescent indifference, never wanted to look at the rushes. According to Brown, she’d watch only when sound pictures were played in reverse: “That’s what Garbo enjoyed. She would sit there shaking with laughter, watching the film running backward and the sound going yakablom-yakablom. But as soon as we ran it forward, she wouldn’t watch it.”

Much has been written about Garbo over the years, but Gottlieb, a former editor of this magazine, has produced a particularly charming, companionable, and clear-eyed guide to her life and work—he has no axe to grind, no urgent need to make a counterintuitive case for her lesser movies, and he’s generous with his predecessors. By the end of the biography, I felt I understood Garbo better as a person, without the aura of mystery around her having been entirely dispelled—and, at this point, who would want it to be?

The actress who came to embody a kind of unattainable elegance, who would someday wear sumptuous period costumes with a grace so offhand that they might have been rumpled p.j.’s, grew up in a cramped apartment with no indoor plumbing, in one of Stockholm’s most impoverished neighborhoods. She was born Greta Lovisa Gustafsson on September 18, 1905, to parents from rural stock. Her mother was, in Gottlieb’s description, “practical, sensible, undemonstrative”; her father, an unskilled laborer, was handsome, musical, and fun, and Greta adored him. But he was stricken by kidney disease, and Greta, the youngest of three children, made the rounds of the charity hospitals with him. “She never forgot the humiliations they endured as poor people in search of live-or-die attention,” Gottlieb writes. She was fourteen when he died, and she dropped out of school, leaving her with a lasting embarrassment about her lack of formal education. She went to work to help support the family, first at a barbershop, where she applied shaving soap to men’s faces, then at a department store, where she sold and modelled hats. She said later that she was “always sad as a child for as long as I can think back. . . . I did some skating and played with snowballs, but most of all I wanted to be alone with myself.”

Alongside her shyness and her penchant for solitude, Greta harbored a passionate desire to be an actress. As a kid, she’d roam the city by herself, looking for theatres where she could stand at the stage door and watch the performers come and go. The first time Garbo was in front of the camera was at age fifteen, in an advertising film for the department store that employed her. Sweden had a thriving film industry, and she soon quit her day job to appear in a couple of movies. At Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theatre, to which she was accepted at seventeen, the young actors were instructed in a system that “scientifically” analyzed the semiotics of movement and gesture. Remarkably, some of her lecture notes from that time survive—she jotted down that “the head bent forward equals a mild concession” or a “condescending attitude,” and that “the throwing back of the head” conveys “a violent feeling such as love.” Barry Paris, an earlier biographer whom Gottlieb cites approvingly, notes that “Garbo in silent films would employ that system of gestural meaning to a high degree.” She did so in her sound pictures as well. When she plays the Russian ballerina in “Grand Hotel” (1932), her body language is jittery, neurotic. Depressed, she lets her head droop as if it were simply too heavy to hold up; surprised by delight at the prospect of a romance with John Barrymore’s gentleman jewel thief, she tosses her head back at giddy angles. It might have been laughable, but instead it’s riveting.

In the spring of 1923, the gifted film director Mauritz Stiller approached the Stockholm theatre looking for actresses to cast in his new movie, an epic based on a Swedish novel, “The Story of Gösta Berling.” Stiller came from a Jewish family in Finland; orphaned young, he had fled to Sweden to avoid being conscripted into the tsar’s Army. Garbo and he were never lovers—Stiller preferred men—but their relationship was perhaps the most important in both of their lives. With his commanding height, his taste for luxury (full-length fur coats, a canary-yellow sports car), and his domineering style with actors, he had more than a touch of the Svengali. But Stiller believed in Garbo at a time when, as one veteran actress put it, Greta was “this little nobody . . . an awkward, mediocre novice,” and he loved her. (He also seems to have been the one who suggested replacing “Gustafsson” with “Garbo.”)

When Hollywood came calling—in the form of Louis B. Mayer scouting European talent for M-G-M—it wasn’t clear whether Stiller was the lure or Garbo; the director was certainly better known. In any case, Stiller made sure that they were a package deal (and, Gottlieb adds, later upped Garbo’s pay to four hundred dollars a week, an “unheard of” salary for an untested starlet). The two sailed for the United States in 1925, arriving in the pungent heat of midsummer New York. (Garbo’s favorite part of the visit seems to have been the roller coaster at Coney Island.) Then it was on to Hollywood by train.

The studio moguls gave an unknown such as Garbo a very short runway. M-G-M signed up the Swedish girl for two pictures, “Torrent” and “The Temptress,” and, as the film historian Robert Dance writes in his smart new book, “The Savvy Sphinx: How Garbo Conquered Hollywood” (Mississippi), “if those first two films were unsuccessful financially M-G-M would not renew her contract for a second year.” As it happened, both were hits. Motion Picture was among the industry outlets declaring her début “a complete success.” (“She is not so much an actress as she is endowed with individuality and magnetism,” it said.) Garbo became a fan favorite, even though she was almost uniquely averse to the kind of goofy stunts and mildly salacious photo shoots that other stars put up with. When she got to be as famous as Lillian Gish, she told one interviewer early on, “I will no longer . . . shake hands with prize-fighters and egg-and-milk men so they will have pictures to put in the papers.” Instead, she worked with consummate portrait photographers who lit her gloriously. Eventually, her films were earning enough that she was able to negotiate an unusual contract, one that gave her the right to veto scripts, co-stars, and directors. And she shunned interviews so consistently that in the end her privacy became its own form of publicity.

Despite such badassery, she never really adjusted to her new country or her new destiny, at least beyond the movie set. What looked like carefully cultivated hauteur was partly the product of awkwardness, disorientation, and grief. She hardly spoke English when she first arrived, and, within a year, she learned that her beloved sister, an aspiring actress herself, had died back home. Stiller did not make a smooth adjustment to Hollywood and, in a blow to them both, he was not chosen to direct Garbo’s first American picture. Garbo wrote to a friend in Sweden about how miserable she was: “This ugly, ugly America, all machine, it is excruciating.” The only thing that made her happy, she claimed, was sending money to her family. At a young age, Gottlieb writes, she found herself “trapped in a spotlight extreme even by Hollywood standards,” and with no psychological preparation for grappling with the kind of fame—movie stardom—that was new not just to her but to the world.

Athletic and physically restless, she soon took up the long nighttime walks that became a refuge; with her hat pulled low over her head, as it customarily was, she would have been hard to recognize. Stiller, who probably felt that his young protégée no longer needed him, returned to Sweden, where he died in 1928, at the age of forty-five, reportedly clutching a photograph of her. “He never seems to have resented her dazzling ascent to fame,” Gottlieb writes, “only wanting her to be happy and fulfilled.” Back in Sweden to mourn him, Garbo went with his lawyer to the storehouse containing his possessions, where she walked around touching his belongings and murmuring about her memories. Gottlieb says that this episode must surely have been an inspiration for the scene in “Queen Christina” in which Garbo’s character moves around a room at an inn, touching all the inanimate reminders of the lover she will never spend another night with. On sets, she would sometimes talk softly to herself about what her mentor might have told her to do—one director she worked with referred to Stiller as “the green shadow.”

Garbo appears to have been emotionally stunted in certain ways, damaged by the loss of her father, her sister, and Stiller, abashed by the limitations of her English and her education. Though she had a sense of humor, she emerges in Gottlieb’s portrait as prickly, stubborn, and stingy. The sudden onslaught of celebrity made her more so. She never married, had children, or apparently wanted to do either; she had brief romantic relationships, mostly with men (the actor John Gilbert, probably the conductor Leopold Stokowski), and likely with women, too (the leading candidate seems to have been the writer Mercedes De Acosta, the “ubiquitous lesbian rake,” in Gottlieb’s words, who had affairs with Marlene Dietrich and many others). Her longest-lasting relationships were with friends, especially, as Gottlieb makes clear, those who helped her logistically, advised her devotedly, and steadfastly refused to spill the tea about her. In these, she had pretty good, if not unerring, taste. Probably the closest and most enduring friendship was with Salka Viertel, the intellectually vibrant woman at the center of L.A.’s remarkable community of refugee writers, composers, and filmmakers from Germany.

From the start of her Hollywood career in silent pictures, Garbo was often cast as a vamp—the kind of man-eater who shimmied and inveigled and home-wrecked her way through so many nineteen-twenties movies. (See the entire career of Theda Bara.) As Robert Dance notes, “Adultery and divorce were catnip to post World War I audiences.” The parts quickly bored her: “I cannot see any sense in dressing up and doing nothing but tempting men.” Off the job, she eschewed makeup and liked to dress in slacks, men’s oxford shoes, and grubby sweaters. Her closet was full of men’s tailored shirts and ties. She often referred to herself as a “fellow” and sometimes signed her letters “Harry” or “Harry Boy.” The movie role she seems to have liked best was the learned cross-dressing seventeenth-century monarch Christina; it allowed her to stride around in tunics, tight-fitting trousers, and tall boots, to kiss one of her ladies-in-waiting full on the lips, to declare that she intended to “die a bachelor!” (As plenty of gender-studies scholars will tell you, this is one queer movie.) She expressed a longing to play St. Francis of Assisi, complete with a beard, and Oscar Wilde’s vain hero Dorian Gray. In today’s terms, Garbo might have occupied a spot along the nonbinary spectrum. Gottlieb doesn’t press the point, but remarks, “How ironic if ‘the Most Beautiful Woman in the World’ really would rather have been a man.”

Her third American film, “Flesh and the Devil” (1926)—the ultimate nineteen-twenties title—transformed her into an international star. It’s about a love triangle involving two best friends, played by the magnetic John Gilbert and the handsome Swedish actor Lars Hanson, with Garbo at its apex. It, too, is a pretty queer movie, though it seems less in control of its signifiers than, say, “Queen Christina.” As Gottlieb points out, the two male leads are forever clasping each other fervently, bringing their faces close together, as if about to kiss. (It heightens the vibe that, in silent-movie fashion, Hanson appears to be wearing lipstick some of the time, and Gilbert eyeliner.) “Flesh and the Devil” also features some of the most erotic scenes I’ve ever encountered on film. There’s one, in a nighttime garden, in which Garbo rolls a cigarette between her lips, then puts it between Gilbert’s, her eyes never leaving his, as he strikes a match and illuminates their gorgeous, besotted faces. There’s one where she lies back in sensual abandon on a couch, Gilbert’s head lolling against her lap, and he lifts her hand and drags her fingers across his mouth. And then there’s my favorite: she and Gilbert are at a Communion rail in church. By now, Gilbert’s character has killed her first husband in a duel, and she has married the other friend, but they’re still crazy about each other, natch. Gilbert sips from the chalice just before she does, and, when the priest hands it to her, she turns it around to drink greedily from the side her lover’s lips have just touched. Her expression is one of slow-burn ecstasy.

Gilbert and Garbo fell in love while they were making the movie, but their story is a sad one, mainly because Gilbert is a sad figure. He is often offered up as an example of an actor who couldn’t make the transition to sound—his voice was said to have been too reedy or something. That turns out to have been an urban legend: his voice was fine. The trouble was that he was best at playing boyish men undone by love at a time when, as Gottlieb observes, Depression-era Hollywood was more into “gangsters, snappy dialogue, musicals.” Garbo and Gilbert lived out a “Star Is Born” trajectory. When they made “Flesh and the Devil,” he was a big-name actor at the height of his powers, and he helped Garbo by making sure the camera angles were right for her and each take of her was the best it could be. One story is that he planted a stand of trees on his property in the Hollywood Hills to remind her of the woods in Sweden, and he apparently proposed to her repeatedly. (She professed herself puzzled that she kept refusing a more permanent bond, but she did.) By the time she made “Queen Christina,” in 1933, she had top billing, and she insisted that Gilbert, who was then married to someone else, and professionally on the skids, play her romantic interest—rejecting the studio’s choice, a young Laurence Olivier. Gilbert later remembered that she was tactful and considerate with him on the set, though he was drinking heavily, throwing up blood, and nervous about his performance. “It is a rare moment in Garbo’s history,” Gottlieb writes, “when we can fully admire, even love her, as a human being, not only as an artist.” Gilbert died three years later, at the age of thirty-eight. Garbo was characteristically unsentimental. “Gott, I wonder what I ever saw in him,” she remarked while he was still alive. “Oh well, I guess he was pretty.”

Why did Garbo stop acting? It wasn’t as though her star was truly on the wane. It had been years since she’d made her successful transition to talkies, with a dialogue-heavy adaptation of Eugene O’Neill’s “Anna Christie.” (From the moment she uttered her first lines, “Gimme a whiskey—ginger ale on the side—and don’t be stingy, baby,” her accent proved to be a sexy asset.) She’d been nominated for four Best Actress Oscars. In 1939, she’d made “Ninotchka,” the romantic comedy in which she played a Soviet apparatchik on a mission to Paris who falls in love with a playboy count and discovers, as the pitch for it went, “capitalism not so bad after all.” It was a huge hit—more than four hundred thousand people went to see it at Radio City Music Hall during a three-week run, Gottlieb says. Garbo is very funny, deadpanning her way through the first half of it in boxy jackets, rationally assessing Melvyn Douglas’s charms. (“Your general appearance is not distasteful.”) As one biographer, Robert Payne, wrote, the performance worked so brilliantly because it satirized “Garbo herself, or rather her legend: the cold Northerner immune to marriage, solemn and self-absorbed.”

The next and last movie she made, “Two-Faced Woman,” a clumsy attempt to re-create comedy magic with Douglas, was a turkey, but she could surely have survived it. Instead, she considered projects that fell through, turned down others (offered the female lead in Hitchcock’s “The Paradine Case,” Gottlieb writes, she is supposed to have sent her agent a telegram saying “no mamas. no murderers”), and slowly drifted away from the business of moviemaking. She had never liked the limelight and, Gottlieb says, lacked the relentless drive that animated contemporaries such as Marlene Dietrich or Joan Crawford. She doesn’t seem to have been particularly vain about her beauty, but she was practical enough to know its precise value, and to anticipate the cost of its fading. And, though she seems to have enjoyed acting, she was never satisfied with the results. “Oh, if once, if only once I could see a preview and come home feeling satisfied,” she remarked after one film screening. Garbo was no Norma Desmond, viewing her old films over and over to admire her own image. Screening some of them years later, at moma, Barry Paris reported, she got a kick out of imitating herself: “R-r-rodney, when will this painful love of ours ever die?” She once told the actor David Niven that she’d quit because she had “made enough faces.” The analysis was typical of her—unreflective, cryptic, deprecatory.

She was, Tennessee Williams thought, “the saddest of creatures—an artist who abandons her art.” Yet Garbo doesn’t seem to have seen herself that way. Perhaps attuned to the perils of growing old in Hollywood, she moved to New York, to an apartment on the East Side, spent long stretches of time in Europe with friends who were wealthy or witty or both, went to the theatre, collected a bit of art. She did not reinvent herself as a memoirist or a philanthropist (though her estate was valued at roughly fifty million dollars when she died, in 1990) or an ambassador of any sort of good will. People loved the mystery of it all; photographers were always chasing after her. But she wasn’t in hiding; she got out. One wag called her a “hermit about town.”

Did Garbo have a rich inner life to sustain her for all those years? There isn’t much evidence of it. She was not a remarkable or notably confiding letter writer, journal keeper, or conversationalist; she does not seem to have had a surfeit of intellectual curiosity. In the movies, she had always been able to convey a sense of hidden depths, of memories and emotions lighting room after interior room, never quite surfacing to be articulated. Were those feelings complex, interesting? We were persuaded they must be. The relationship to fame that she enacted in the last decades of her life was something similar: it looked profound, perhaps even spiritual—a renunciation of celebrity’s blessings as well as its scourges. But who knows? Maybe she was just tired of making faces. ♦

[anarcho-occultism]

The Time Baby

The domain of time has been traditionally most closely associated with Yog-Sothoth. Yog-Sothoth, an Outer God, indeed embodies time itself. Yog-Sothoth is responsible for the very existence of time and also serves as the gate to halting, reversing or otherwise traversing it. The otherwise largely-distant god will from time to time select random individuals to pause time with a television remote or rewind to undo past mistakes. Yog-Sothoth blessed one of the earliest races to emerge, the Gallifreyans, with the key to temporal travel, paving the way for them to become the Time Lords. For a long time, it was they who took responsibility for maintaining order in a singular timeline, seeking to resolve paradoxes to prevent chronovores or langoliers from devouring existence. This enabled them to prosper and shape the universe by seeding it with the dominant humanoid form thanks to the efforts of a trio of female Time Giants (a subcategory of Time Lords capable of altering their size at will). However, ultimately their efforts would end with the Time War, a great conflict between the Time Lords and the Daleks of Skaro. The Time War threatened to unmake reality as countless paradoxes emerged, various horrors manifested and even the Time Lords themselves temporarily became known as the Great Houses. In the end, Gallifrey was timelocked successfully.

However, this threatened to ensure the collapse of time. Yog-Sothoth, being a god, was able to perceive how inevitably the existence of myriad time travelers who were not as cautious as the Time Lords could trigger too many paradoxes and obliterate the timeline. As a result, Yog-Sothoth would emanate a newer form in the form of the Time Baby. The Time Baby was technically the second offspring of Yog-Sothoth–the first, the Nightmare Child, had been accidentally birthed by the chaos of the Time War. The Time Baby, on the other hand, was purposefully created by his father (with the help of one of the aforementioned Time Giants, the last of the three before her death) with a simple goal in mind: to achieve temporal stability. The Time Baby, existing within the very flow of time, spent eons pondering how to achieve this task. He made contact with numerous beings who had attained or existed in higher states of existence, including the Ellimist, the Buddha, Death the Horseman, Bhelliom and the Soul King in a bid to determine how to fulfill his purpose. In the end, the Time Baby determined that he could not single-handedly maintain the timeline and would instead have to create groups that could do so.

The TIme Baby’s first organization created to maintain the timeline was the creation of the Time Cops. This group had a dogmatic approach to time travel–namely that it was not ever used legitimately and must be quashed. The Time Cops sought to pursue any and all time travelers and stop them from traveling through time on the supposed basis it would unravel reality. However, the Time Baby was forced to abandon this plan owing to the sheer volume of time travelers. The Time Baby also realized time was a lot more fluid than previously envisioned. As an experiment, the Time Baby would set up a second organization: the Time Variance Authority. The TVA was designed to have a cyclical organizational timeline, originating at the end of time with the actions of its last leader. The Time Baby was surprised to see it worked generally well and from there would set up a number of other organizations to maintain the timeline. The Time Squad, Tenet, the Menders of Ouroboros, the History Monks, the Chronoguard, the Time Patrol and the Commission were all subsequently set up by the Time Baby to keep time operating within expected parameters. The Time Baby also sought to work with existent institutions to set up other temporal monitoring groups–the Temporal Prime Directive being established within the United Federation of Planets for instance. The Time Baby ultimately would build a network of organizations spanning nearly the totality of history, across a myriad of different species and planets.

The Time Baby’s network would be forced to confront many different threats. One of the first in an independent chronology would be the Great Race of Yith, who were not bound by linear time and could jump around history to stave off extinction. The Yith would first come to the attention of the Time Baby when they sought to overtake humanity in the latter Hyborean Age, in an incident that later became the basis of the apocryphal Book of Enoch. The Time Baby viewed the Yith’s efforts to escape extinction as a threat to the overall integrity of the timeline and his agents would clash with them until the Yith were able to satisfy the TIme Baby by relegating their jump to a species of intelligent beetle in Earth’s far-off future. Another concern for the Time Baby was the chaos surrounding the city of Chronopolis, a research facility sent back in time by an experiment. Chronopolis was accompanied in its travels by an alternate dimensional counterpart from a more negative future, though this center was subdued and a singular timeline able to be established. Disruptions in Chronopolis would threaten to destabilize this arrangement, forcing the intervention of the TVA to prune the timeline and maintain a singular flow of events. The TIme Baby would also have to send operatives to intervene during the Philadelphia Experiment incident that occurred due to time travel between 1943 and 1984, buying enough time for the individuals impacted directly to halt an apocalyptic paradox. The Time Baby also sought to recruit a number of time travelers into his organizations, especially favoring those who began traversing time as children such as Jodie Arthur, Jack and Annie Smith and Baron Wilhelm Heinrich von Troomp.

At one point, the Time Baby subtly influenced the reality bender Haruhi Suzumiya’s powers to block all time travel from prior to the advent of her powers in a bid to manage later points of history more clearly. This effort was carried out to deal with a number of later-era would-be temporal conquerors. Kang the Conqueror of the 3rd millennium AD was the most notable of these. Kang had a number of forces operating on his behalf as well, such as the Black Moon Clan, the Metal Men and the Expanoids who Kang relied on after earlier attempts at direct conquest were foiled by the Avengers. The Time Baby permitted the Chronoguard to give the Legion of Super-Heroes of that era the ability to call upon earlier heroes in the Justice League to aid them in fighting and ultimately overthrowing Kang. This was not the only would-be conqueror the Time Baby had to thwart, however. The Committee of 300, helmed by the potential Antichrist Damien Thorn, sought to use its SERN front organization to take over the world via the use of time travel. Thorn’s efforts briefly allowed for the timeline to be overwritten with one where he reigned for a thousand years before being defeated by a time-traveling samurai. The Time Baby was unable to directly prevent these efforts, but via subtle manipulations of individuals was able to relegate that timeline to an alternate ‘mirror dimension’ while allowing the original flow of history to be maintained. The Time Baby allowed pre-1990’s time travel to resume once Thorn’s efforts were defeated.

While generally successful in maintaining an overall flow of time, the Time Baby’s place in the cosmic hierarchy has not gone unquestioned. Despite being the spawn of Yog-Sothoth, the Time Baby faltered before Bill Cipher, an avatar of Nyarlathotep originating in the parallel domain of Flatland. The Time Baby has also failed to draw the sort of religious following one would expect of even a minor deity like Om. On the other hand, the Time Baby’s eventual mastery of the subtle flow of time is undeniable and even while failing to defeat Cipher, managed to withstand his attack despite it all but annihilating the Time Squad. The forces he empowered have also had considerable success going up against beings of extraordinary power and triumphing. Even figures like Rick Sanchez or Stephen Strange, who have abilities far exceeding most, have often been forced to bow to the will of the Time Baby’s enforcers.

References

Gravity Falls, Cthulhu Mythos, Doctor Who, A Wrinkle in Time, Faction Paradox, Animorphs, Buddhist Legend, Supernatural, Sparhawk, Bleach, Timecop, Marvel Comics, Time Squad, Tenet, City of Heroes, Discworld, Thursday Next, Dragon Ball Z, The Umbrella Academy, Star Trek, Conan the Barbarian, The Wanderings of Alhazred, Chrono Trigger, The Philadelphia Experiment, The Magic Tree House, Time Warp Trio, Baron Trump Novels, Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Sailor Moon, Gandahar, Red Dwarf, DC Comics, Science Adventure Series (Steins;Gate), The Omen, A Fictional History of the United States, Samurai Jack, Rick and Morty

[historia-vitae-magistras]

do you think that alfred knows/recognizes he’s arthur’s favorite or do you think he assumes that arthur views him as the “black sheep” of the family

So it's both. Being the black sheep in the family to Alfred is a good thing. And Arthur's favouritism is something they all know, including Alfred. But knowing a fact and being able to acknowledge it and adjust his behaviour accordingly are two very different things, especially in someone like Alfred.

He views himself as extraordinary and average. Simultaneously God's Chosen Country and self-made, just the boy next door and destined for greatness. This mythos and his self-esteem are built on conflicting stories, so he's used to holding inconsistent facts in his head as accurate. He's special, which made him the black sheep, and he has never viewed himself as Arthur's heir, but he is aware that his power made Arthur respect him in a way Arthur did not when dealing with his other children. He's intelligent enough to understand and observe that his interactions with Arthur are much different than his other children. And he knows Matt well enough to sometimes see when that favouritism costs Matt something, usually his self-esteem. But he is not... mature? Emotionally intelligent? Enough to articulate it or really change his behaviour much. In Alfred's head, he has Arthur's respect but not his love, when in reality has the most of both.

[agentgrange]

What is some fiction outside of the mythos or DG that you look to for inspiration?

Excellent, fun question. I've been on a narrowboat trip through the countryside and hadn't had a lot of time to get my thoughts out so this is a great way to get back in the headspace actually. This isn't going to be the most coherent answer in the world but off the top of my head here's some ideas and recommendations in no particular order.

Philip K Dick-- I've talked about his work a bit before, less because of his works themselves (there's a lot there that's problematic and can be cut) and more because he really channels that bridge between Lovecraft's historic paranoia and a modern contemporary setting

Basically any works by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Grant Morrison-- I feel like I don't need to say a lot about these authors, they really are the triarchy that serve as the prime example of how to distill complex occult principles into media. They really paved the way for how to take an abstract idea and shape it into fiction as a way to sort of upload an idea into another person's brain.

Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker and Les Edwards-- this graphic novel really was my gateway into horror as something more complex than the slasher / torture porn that was en vogue when I was growing up which had previously turned me off of the genre.

Strangehaven by Gary Spencer Millidge-- beautiful and inspiring labor of love about a small town subject to extraordinary circumstances

Mononoke & Ayakashi: Samurai Horror Tales-- Beautiful stories that give a window into how another culture expresses the same ideas as a lot of the works above

Satoshi Kon's movies to me really tap into the same energy as Philip K Dick but without a lot of the ugliness and much more beauty. Perfect Blue and Tokyo Godfathers are my two favorites to the point that I honestly get emotional just thinking about them.

I don't need to tell you about Akira, but I will absolutely recommend you don't discount it's more low brow contemporaries like Urotsukidoji and Wicked City for some fucked up exploitation anime.

Possession (1981) is genuinely my all time favorite work of surrealist horror and a cornerstone for a lot of my ideas

Society (1989) what if Possession was even more fucked up & grind house but also silly? :3c

Obviously X-Files, Twin Peaks, and True Detective are giant influences but I'd like to recommend a fourth "weird cop" show-- FX's Fargo. The original movie was already a true crime classic but the show really takes it to 11. Season 2 is probably my favorite for reasons that will be apparent for anyone who's watched it.

Lastly the bulk of media I regularly consume is usually actually non-fiction. History, particularly US history, is fucked up and clown shoes enough that it has all the inspiration you might need if you just have a good source that can present it as an interesting narrative. Last Podcast on the Left is a good gateway into this but there's plenty of other more "serious" sources that can still be just as entertaining like the podcast Blowback. Once you're able to put history into a narrative you can be entertained by and feel invested in it becomes a lot more interesting to read books from authoritative sources that help feed into that interest because you have an emotional connection to it instead of it just being a series of context-less names and dates.